Evaluation of portable air samplers for monitoring airborne culturable bacteria

Airborne culturable bacteria were monitored at five locations (three in an office/laboratory building and two in a private residence) in a series of e xperiments designed to compare the efficiency of four air samplers: the And ersen two-stage, Burkard portable, RCS Plus, and SAS Super 90 samplers. A t otal of 280 samples was collected. The four samplers were operated simultan eously, each sampling 100 L of air with collection on trypticase soy agar. The data were corrected by applying positive hole conversion factors for th e Burkard portable, Andersen two-stage, and SAS Super 90 air samplers, and were expressed as log(10) values prior to statistical analysis by analysis of variance. The Burkard portable air sampler retrieved the highest number of airborne culturable bacteria at four of the five sampling sites, followe d by the SAS Super 90 and the Andersen two-stage impactor. The number of ba cteria retrieved by the RCS Plus was significantly less than those retrieve d by the other samplers. Among the predominant bacterial genera retrieved b y all samplers were Staphylococcus, Bacillus, Corynebacterium, Micrococcus, and Streptococcus.