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:
“Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Success goes thus invariably with a certain plus or positive power: an ounce of power must balance an ounce of weight.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“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)