A filtered air positive pressure environment in laboratory animal science is a space that is under positive pressure with respect to the outside world. In this way, no germs that could affect the lab animals or that are a threat to the SPF status can enter the facility. To bring in new air, high efficiency particulate air filters (HEPA) are used.
In some facilities, the opposite is done: negative pressure inside prevents escape of germs to the outside world. This is done when the facility does research on dangerous germs like anthrax.
Next to these obvious things, these facilities can have other special hygiene control elements:
- air locks for personnel, feed, bedding, cages and materials (e.g. autoclave with two doors, one to the inside, one to the outside)
- showers for personnel
- emergency power generator or uninterruptible power supplies
Famous quotes containing the words air, positive and/or pressure:
“Oh, it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that’s westward bound to plow the rolling sea,
To the blessed Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.”
—Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933)
“It is easy and dismally enervating to think of opposition as merely perverse or actually evil—far more invigorating to see it as essential for honing the mind, and as a positive good in itself. For the day that moral issues cease to be fought over is the day the word “human” disappears from the race.”
—Jill Tweedie (b. 1936)
“This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to sudden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)