Filenews 1 February 2021
A university researcher from Paphos was recently awarded by the International Risk Analysis Society in the field of risk analysis for his research work on hand hygiene at airports and infectious diseases. This is Christos Nikolaidis, whose research coincided substantially with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in China, which gave it special importance and visibility internationally.
Mr Nikolaidis spoke to "F" about this distinction and his general research activity. Referring to the award-winning research on hand hygiene at the world's airports, the Paphos-born academic explains that the research paper deals with hand hygiene at airports and infectious diseases and has been published in the early days of 2020, just before the spread of Covid-19 began for good inside and outside China.
"Now, what gave the basis to deal with this issue," he said, "are some statistics that we found published on hand hygiene in public places and especially at airports which were particularly disappointing. Just to mention that, at least before the emergence of the new crown and public awareness of hygiene issues, only seven in 10 who go to the toilet wash their hands afterwards, while the remaining 30% do not. And of those who wash their hands, only half do it right, i.e. with water and soap and with the appropriate duration of 15-20 seconds. These data, combined with estimates of the frequency of passenger exposure on various surfaces at an airport, have contributed to the assessment that at any one time around 20% of travellers at an airport have clean hands."
As Mr Nikolaidis explains, using epidemiological simulations that took into account data from all flights at around 3,500 airports worldwide, estimates of the time passengers spend at airports and data on passenger interactions with different surfaces in these areas, "we looked at how improving hand hygiene could help to slow the spread of an infectious disease especially in its early stages".
The results of the study, he points out, show that if the frequency of hand washing at all airports improves through training, arrivals, public announcements and perhaps most importantly improved access to hand sanitation facilities, this would have a significant effect on the rate of spread of an infectious disease such as respiratory infections.
"In particular, if we manage to triple the proportion of travellers who have clean hands at all times, the spread of a virus of up to 50% can be slowed down," he says. "In other words, the various governments can be given twice as much time to plan appropriate intercept measures. Now, why the airports? Airports and air transport are the main way of rapidly spreading an epidemic outside borders. The virus can travel from one side of the planet to the other in just a few hours. If we go to study the spread of the plague in Europe in the 14th century we will see that to transfer the virus from our regions to northern Europe took about 3 years. With Covid-19, within four months of the first confirmed case in the city of Wuhan, the World Health Organization had declared Covid-19 a pandemic. And this difference is largely due to large-scale air travel. At the same time, airports as places facilitate the transmission of a virus, since they are small spaces in relation to the number of people there and the surfaces that passengers often come into contact with are usually unclean."
Slowing the spread of new viruses in the future
Asked by Christos Nikolaidis how the results of this research can be used for today's pandemic, he observes that unfortunately we cannot turn the clock back and slow down the initial spread of the new coronavirus: "What we can do at the moment is to use the results of this study and of course other scientific studies on similar topics. , to slow the spread of either new strains of Covid-19 that are either more deadly or the vaccine is less effective, but also to slow the spread of new viruses that may occur in the future. Of course, intensifying hand hygiene is a challenge. But new approaches to awareness, social media exhortations and the awareness that we live in a pandemic era have proven effective in hand hygiene. Something that could also help improve hand washing rates and general hygiene at airports would be to have hand wash areas available in many more locations, especially outside toilets where surfaces tend to be very polluted."
This study has been published before the widespread spread of the new coronavirus. At the beginning of March last year it was covered by many media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, Voice of America and the World Economic Forum.
The International Risk Analysis Society, which is also the publisher of the scientific journal that published the article, has chosen this study as the best published in the pages of the journal "Risk Analysis" for 2020.
Who is who
Christos Nikolaidis is a Marie Curie fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Business Administration and Public Administration of the University of Cyprus. He also holds a position as a research associate at the Institute of Digital Economics at MIT and a visiting Lecturer at the London Business School. Before joining the University of Cyprus, Mr. Nikolaidis was for three years a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management funded by the James McDonnell Foundation. He has a PhD in Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a master's degree in Applied Mathematics from Imperial College London and a degree in Physics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
It has worked closely with global companies to highlight the business value of investing in social media and information technology. His research papers have been published in major scientific journals such as PNAS and Nature Communications and have been featured by famous media outlets such as The New York Times, CNN and the Los Angeles Times.
On February 6, 2020, he was named "Professor of the Week" by Poets&Quants.
