Despite the tremendous strides we have made against water-borne, food-borne, and vector-borne diseases, airborne infectious diseases remain one of humanity’s biggest challenges: The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed an estimated 27 million lives. Tuberculosis kills 1.6 million people annually. One billion people are infected by influenza every year, leading to millions of serious illnesses and hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Even after a global pandemic that spread largely via aerosols, tools to suppress the spread of airborne disease remain deeply neglected. This neglect is particularly concerning given the exceptional efficiency of airborne transmission in the wrong circumstances. The Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 demonstrated how rapidly airborne pathogens can spread, doubling cases approximately every 2-3 days and infecting an estimated 125 million people globally within just 10 weeks of its identification. Measles, the most infectious human pathogen, is also airborne.

Blueprint’s Priorities

Our work is currently divided primarily into two categories: collective protection and individual protection.

Our collective protection work focuses on identifying, investigating, and advancing the most promising interventions in the built environment that can minimize transmission of airborne pathogens. We divide this into technologies that can be adopted at scale both to prevent endemic disease and suppress novel outbreaks before they become pandemics, and technologies that are uniquely suited to mitigating a novel crisis.

Our individual protection work is dedicated to ensuring that critical workers have a sufficient supply of high quality reusable respirators in the event of a major airborne outbreak.