RATs offer with an Aranet4 and David's update

Hi Everyone,

Before we get going on the rest of what’s happening, we are offering a FREE box of TouchBio RSV, FLU A/B & COVID-19 Rapid Antigen Test (5-pack) worth $55.00 with every Aranet 4 HOME purchase between now and midnight on October 31st. 

This is what you have to do to get your free TouchBio RATs:

1. Add an Aranet4 HOME to your cart.
2. Choose an Aranet4 sticker and add it to cart.
3. Add the TouchBio RATs to cart.
4. Write in the discount codes FREERATS and FREESTICKER at the checkout page. (Please note, while this offer is on, you must write in the FREESTICKER code to make sure you get your free sticker. Before the offer these were discounted to zero automatically.)
5. Sit back and wait, quivering with excitement, for these products to arrive in your mail box.

In other news, we now have a live demo of the Aranet4 PRO system running on our website. Imagine if every school and childcare in Australia displayed live air quality data, including CO2 levels. How long would parents stand for their children spending the day in dirty, unhealthy air if they could see this information? And, in case you think this is fantasy, such a thing already exists in the Boston public schools system. Click on

Another day, another excellent article by Hayley Gleeson of the ABC about the Covid Safety for Schools course, conceived and created by Colin Skinner:

The course itself is in depth and is not just about COVID safety, but reducing all airborne infections in the school setting. It is also completely free and you can register for it here.

Colin has recently published a ninety minute primer video on how to make the air safe in schools, which is well worth watching:

Like many, I have been glued to the melodrama of the upcoming US election and in the process I have become a huge fan of the presidential historian, Jon Meacham, and his wise appraisal of the march of history, with its fits and starts, dead ends, reverses and ultimate, haphazard, agonisingly slow progress.

Listen here to Jon Meacham's short reflections on patience and persistence and the importance of listening to activists, who, by definition, operate outside the window of social norms and acceptance, also known as the Overton Window. It is both sobering and inspiring and it is three minutes of your life I guarantee you will treasure.

Simply by reading this newsletter, of course, you are placing yourself outside the Overton Window, when it comes to understanding the importance of airborne transmission of illness and of clean indoor air generally.

That makes you an activist for clean indoor air, because the majority of people do not recognise unhealthy indoor air as an issue and by asking for it it is easy to become labelled as “weird”. What is genuinely weird, though, is that while everyone acknowledges that polluted outdoor air is bad, many have a corresponding blind spot for unhealthy indoor air. Can you fathom it? I can’t.

The good news is that the Overton Window on the importance of healthy, breathable indoor is definitely shifting, especially here in Australia, a country with a reputation for being open to new ideas, making it the developed world’s test lab for innovation. One of the most encouraging developments has been the government support for the establishment in 2023 of The ARC Training Centre for Advanced Building System against Airborne Infection Transmission (THRIVE). Lead by, among others, Professor Lidia Morawska of the Queensland University of Technology, one of the world’s leading aerosol scientists, THRIVE has four interconnected research programs that aim to improve indoor air quality. 

Just this week, and particularly heartening, is this from Ben Carroll MP, Victorian Deputy Premier, Minister for Education, Minister for Medical Research:

But wait, there is more! Professor Brendan Crabb of the Burnet Institute, Professor Lidia Morawska of QUT and others also met with the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, last month to promote the cause of clean indoor air:

Nevertheless, a significant proportion of the scientific and medical establishment is still trying to maintain that this illness is now “just a seasonal cold”, while the evidence is clearly otherwise. It’s not seasonal (unless seasonal now means ‘every season’), and it certainly isn’t a cold. The cost of Long Covid in Australia alone runs into the multi billions of dollars a year and most affects the 30-49 year old age group. Just published in Nature is a study which shows subjective and objective cognitive deficits at one year post moderate and severe COVID, associated with measurable brain damage. 

This is a multi-system disorder with severe acute symptoms and a staggering death rate - twelve times higher than flu in the period January to April 2024 - and a multitude of severe long-term symptoms. 

Opinion columnists in major newspapers are now becoming increasingly annoyed with getting repeatedly infected all the time and especially getting infected on aircraft (non-paywall link here). Research continues to pour in on Long Covid in kids: “The results of the new study should reframe how parents think about the risks the virus poses to their children”.

We must not keep reinfecting ourselves and our kids with this harmful virus!

The pandemic has certainly opened my eyes to the overwhelming importance of clean air for our health and the fact that it’s not just airborne transmission of infectious agents we need to consider.

Mould, bush fire smoke, air pollution, industrial exposure and the equity aspects of clean air - once you know this stuff, you can’t ‘unknow’ it, especially the equity aspects. By failing to provide safe public indoor air, our societies are discriminating against those with vulnerabilities, which is… not just immoral, but illegal. And yet it continues.

In my mission to expand that Overton Window ever further, therefore, I am putting together a conference in Canberra next year, which will bring together people from medicine, public health, aerosol science, building engineering, social sciences and politics to try and tackle this problem in the only way it can be tackled - by everyone from different disciplines working together. The conference is called “Every Breath You Take” (of course!). Stay tuned for further details in upcoming newsletters.

And that’s it from me for now, folks. If you need N95s, you know where to go to get them: Auras, Tridents, ReadiMasks, Stealth Claritys and especially our new bestsellers, the black Canadian Vitacore N99s. 

As ever, send me your most interesting CO2 traces and I will post them on Twitter for the general education of all of us.

Stay persistent, friends, and keep the faith that the arc of history will, eventually, tortuously, ploddingly, and with many reverses and false dawns, come to point towards a reality where dirty indoor air is as unacceptable as dirty drinking water.

Cheers! 🥂

David