Recently, airborne fungi as indoor air pollutant have attention due to its health related problems such as asthma, rhinitis, sinusitis, atopy, pneumonia, building syndrome and etc.. However, it is considered that current laws and policies in Korea are not efficient to deal with these problems. Our research investigated influential factors and species distribution on the basis of previous research related to airborne fungi issue conduced in Korea by applying meta analysis technique. We selected 15 articles containing variables affecting fungi population such as outdoor air characteristics, temperature, location, and ventilation to evaluate significant factors. It was confirmed that airborne fungi level has partial correlation to those factors despite of limited sample size. It is required that the consistent and systematic research effort should be extended to characterize health effect caused by these fungi as well as to control them efficiently.

The children of daycare center are sensitive to indoor environmental pollution. This study was a preliminary investigation for improving the environmental and healthy quality of daycare centers. The sampling of sites in daycare centers was undertaken three times such as day-morning (10:00-12:00), afternoon (16:00-20:00), following dawn (04:00-08:00)-at 21 daycare centers located in Seoul, Korea from April, 2012 to July, 2012. The mean concentrations of TVOC were 255.2, 217.0, and 439.4 μg/m3 at morning, afternoon, and following dawn, respectively. The daycare center indoor/outdoor ratios on the most targeted volatile organic compounds were above 1.0 except that for carbon tetrachloride, which was almost 1.0. Significant correlations (p<0.01) were observed between indoor and outdoor carbon tetrachloride, which implies that indoor carbon tetrachloride could be largely accounted for by outdoor sources. The other targeted indoor volatile organic compounds such as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, styrene, xylenes, chloroform showed no significant correlations with that of outdoor.

Generally, the traffic noise occurring on roads has emerged as an important factor that harms the residential environment. Because of the noise, residents living near roads have been causing civil complaints. Therefore, it is required to evaluate road traffic noise during the whole procedures of building an apartment, ranging from design to construction. And if an evaluated noise exceeds regulation standards, some measures to prevent the noise, such as installation of soundproof walls, and other kinds of plans should be prepared. In this point, this work measured road traffic noise in a site of housing land development, investigated its characteristics, and used a simulation program to predict outdoor noise on the basis of the data about traffic effect evaluation, design drawing, and the data about site measurement. Based on the prediction, it also predicted indoor noise. It is judged that this research will serve as an important material to establish soundproof measures on the basis of prediction of traffic noise in building an apartment.

The aim of this study was to investigate the perception of government's asbestos management policy for asbestos managers in school and asbestos industries, who are stakeholders related to asbestos, and the general public. The purpose is to suggest preliminary data for the establishment of communication methodology of asbestos risk, fit for the features of each audiences, by grasping the features of risk communication by each element for each group survey. For this study, a questionnaire survey has been conducted from May to August in 2012 and the responses of 617 people including 214 school asbestos managers, 95 managers related to asbestos industry and 308 the general people have been analyzed. As a result of the measurement of asbestos risk, the perception degree of general asbestos risk is higher in general public than the expert group's one, women than men, and nonsmokers than smokers. For the reliability of government's asbestos risk management, it was shown that it is the highest in school asbestos managers with public official personalities, who are a quasi-expert group for asbestos, than any other groups, the expert group of managers related to asbestos industry is in the middle level and general public group is in the lowest level. For trust in of government policy, it was shown that it is higher in school asbestos managers, than in group of managers related to asbestos industry, and the general public has a similar level of reliability with the group of managers related to asbestos industry. After consideration of path coefficient by structural equation modeling in order to investigate the relation between factors that the trust affects of asbestos management policy among the variables of awareness of asbestos management policy, it has been shown that the main factor in reliability of asbestos policy in all investigated groups was an awareness of information sharing for asbestos policy, and the second factor was reliability in government's asbestos risk management.

Developing proper reduction strategies of indoor radon which have been an important issue in Korea requires proper information on source characteristics a phosphate gypsum board which is a common building material used for inter-wall thermal protection in Korea could be a major source of indoor radon level. This study evaluated the correlation between indoor radon concentration and the attribution of gypsum board content in building materials. In this study we valuated indoor/outdoor radon from 58 facilities selected based on the information availability of gypsum content in the building material across 8 different cities in Korea. Our results showed that indoor radon concentrations were 2 to 3 times higher than outdoor but those results were not significantly attributed from gypsum contents in the building material. Indeed, phosphate content in gypsum board did not significantly play a role in indoor radon level variations. It is concluded that physical environmental condition such as temperature, relative humidity, radon exhalation rate out of each building materials, as well as pathway from external sources (e.g., soil) needs to be identified to develop indoor radon reduction strategies.

Since airborne fungi have been known to aggravate indoor air quality, studies on developing anti-fungal filters increase recently. In this study, silver (Ag) nanoparticle was selected as anti-fungal agent. HEPA filter was coated with silver nanoparticles which were generated via spark discharge system operating at atmospheric pressure and temperature. The anti-fungal effect of the Ag-filter was evaluated with the conventional culture assay. When the number of Ag nano particle per a fungal particle in the filter was 1.91X106, the fungicidal efficiency was higher than 99%. As another anti-fungal test, ATP bioluminiscence detection method was also carried out and the results were correlated with those of the culture assay.