ABSTRACT
The firm recognition in the past few years that saprotrophic fungi and bacteria could have serious, even life-threatening, health consequences has revealed the need to investigate residential buildings and non-industrial workplaces for microbiological contamination. Investigations that are carried out for this purpose are however of uneven quality, because there are few people with the range of experience necessary to conduct sophisticated investigations, and because of the lack of standardized protocols for the microbiological sampling that might be necessary. The American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA) published a manual of consensus methods for microbiological sampling that has partially addressed this aspect of the problem (Dillon et al. 1996). The American Conference of Government Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH) has recently published a more comprehensive manual (Macher et al. 1999) on microbiological problems of buildings. This includes chapters on investigation and remediation and recognizes the AIHA manual. In the present chapter, an attempt will be made to put this information into a practical context and provide information on the limitations of the data obtained using different sampling methods. The sampling of Legionella has been covered in Chapter 3.4, and sampling for saprotrophic bacteria, endotoxin and peptidyl glycan (peptidoglycan) is discussed more fully in Dillon et al. (1996).
