Finishing this book is giving me a mixture of relief, satisfaction and frus tration. Relief, for the completion of a project that has taken too many of my evenings and weekends and that, in the last several months, has become almost an obsession. Satisfaction, for the optimistic feeling that this book, in spite of its many shortcomings and imbalances, will be of some help to the air pollution scientific community. Frustration, for the impossibility of incorporating newly available material that would require another major review of several key chap ters - an effort that is currently beyond my energies but not beyond my desires. The first canovaccio of this book came out in 1980 when I was invited by Computational Mechanics in the United Kingdom to give my first Air Pollution Modeling course. The course material, in the form of transparencies, expanded, year after year, thus providing a growing working basis. In 1985, the ECC Joint Research Center in Ispra, Italy, asked me to prepare a critical survey of mathe matical models of atmospheric pollution, transport and deposition. This support gave me the opportunity to prepare a sort of "first draft" of the book, which I expanded in the following years.

This comprehensive handbook provides up-to-date knowledge and practical advice from established authorities in aerosol science. It covers the principles and practices of bioaerosol sampling, descriptions and comparisons of bioaerosol samplers, calibration methods, and assay techniques, with an emphasis on practicalities, such as which sampler to use and where it should be placed. The text also offers critiques concerning handling the samples to provide representative and meaningful assays for their viability, infectivity, and allergenicity. A wide range of microbes-viz., viruses, bacteria, fungi and pollens, and their fragments-are considered from such perspectives. Bioaerosols Handbook is divided into four parts, providing a wide-ranging reference work, as well as a practical guide on how best to sample and assay bioaerosols using current technology.