Tuberculosis (TB) is a leading cause of infectious disease deaths, claiming over 1 million lives every year. It spreads through the air when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or exhales, and drug-resistant strains and asymptomatic spreading are growing concerns. Curbing TB transmission is an urgent public health challenge, yet scientists still don't understand how airflow and other environmental factors influence that spread. One problem is that studies of infectious disease transmission have focused mainly on population-level assessments or individual immune responses. But understanding how airflow and mixing influence transmission in indoor spaces requires expertise in fluid physics and computational modeling. An interdisciplinary team including researchers at MIT and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center has now combined animal transmission experiments with quantitative particle tracking and flow modeling to understand how some lab-based environments can promote...
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