Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, United States.
John B. Little Center for Radiation Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, United States.
Front Public Health. 2020 Dec 18;8:590412. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2020.590412. eCollection 2020.
During air travel, flight crew (flight attendants, pilots) can be exposed to numerous flight-related environmental DNA damaging agents that may be at the root of an excess risk of cancer and other diseases. This already complex mix of exposures is now joined by SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The complex exposures experienced during air travel present a challenge to public health research, but also provide an opportunity to consider new strategies for understanding and countering their health effects. In this article, we focus on threats to genomic integrity that occur during air travel and discuss how these threats and our ability to respond to them may influence the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and the development of range of severity of the symptoms. We also discuss how the virus itself may lead to compromised genome integrity. We argue that dauntingly complex public health problems, such as the challenge of protecting flight crews from COVID-19, must be met with interdisciplinary research teams that include epidemiologists, engineers, and mechanistic biologists.
在航空旅行中，机组人员（空乘人员、飞行员）可能会接触到许多与飞行相关的环境 DNA 损伤剂，这些损伤剂可能是癌症和其他疾病发病率过高的根源。现在，这种已经很复杂的暴露组合又加入了 SARS-CoV-2，即导致 COVID-19 的病毒。航空旅行中经历的复杂暴露对公共卫生研究构成了挑战，但也为了解和应对其健康影响提供了新的策略的机会。在本文中，我们重点关注航空旅行过程中发生的基因组完整性威胁，并讨论这些威胁以及我们应对这些威胁的能力如何影响 SARS-CoV-2 感染的风险和一系列严重程度的症状的发展。我们还讨论了病毒本身如何导致基因组完整性受损。我们认为，必须由包括流行病学家、工程师和机制生物学家在内的跨学科研究团队来应对诸如保护机组人员免受 COVID-19 感染等艰巨的复杂公共卫生问题。
