Letters to the Editor

This article refers to:

Headform and N95 Filtering Facepiece Respirator Interaction: Contact Pressure Simulation and Validation

Dispersion and Exposure to a Cough-Generated Aerosol in a Simulated Medical Examination Room

CORRECTION

Iam writing on behalf of myself and my co-authors to correct a typographical error in the Discussion section of our published article, “Headform and N95 Filtering Facepiece Respirator Interaction: Contact Pressure Simulation and Validation,” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene 9:46–58, January 2012. The corrected sentence in the second paragraph in the right-hand column, page 56, should read: “It may imply that an uneven distribution of the pressure on the contact area causes air leakages.”

James Yang

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Texas Tech University

Lubbock, Texas

CORRECTION

We would like to make a correction to our recent article, “Dispersion and Exposure to a Cough-Generated Aerosol in a Simulated Medical Examination Room” (Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene 9:681–690, December 2012). In the Methods section, we state that, “… the particle counts for each size range were summed over 1-min intervals and divided by the instrument flow rate (1.2 L/min) to obtain the average concentration.” After recent discussions with the instrument manufacturer, we have realized this procedure was incorrect. The particle counter does not report particle counts per time interval. It reports the particle concentration (divided by 10) at each time point, which already includes a correction for the instrument flow rate. Thus, the particle concentrations in the article should be multiplied by 1.2 to get the correct values. We apologize for the confusion.

William G. Lindsley

William P. King

Robert E. Thewlis

Jeffrey S. Reynolds

Kedar Panday

Gang Cao

Jonathan V. Szalajda

NIOSH

Morgantown, West Virginia