Most populations in modern time spend close to, or more than, 90% of their time indoors, including homes, schools, workplaces, transportation and recreational venues, among other built facilities or environments. Exposure to bioaerosols is of special health concern to people in Taiwan noted for its subtropical climate of warm temperature and relative humidity throughout the year. In particular, elementary schools and daycare centers (kindergartens and nurseries) house some of the most susceptible groups while contaminated environments, such as damp classrooms are suggested to be a risk factor attributable to reporting allergic or respiratory diseases. Preliminary results showed that of all the 100 investigated sites, the indoor fungal concentrations of the 50 children daycare centers are lower than those in outdoors (1542.8 vs 2054.7 CFU/m3). The same trend was found that the indoor fungal concentrations are lower than those in outdoors of the 50 elementary schools (2577.7 vs 2060.3 CFU/m3). Yet, the average levels found in daycare centers and elementary schools with higher fungal concentration indoors (1542.8 and 2577.7 CFU/m3, respectively) have exceeded Taiwan EPA indoor air quality recommendation level of 1000 CFU/m3. For those having fungal indoor/outdoor ratios (I/O ratios) greater than 1, it is suggested that there are potential sources for fungal contamination indoors. Whether it can be partially related to the catastrophic Typhoon Morakot last year which resulted in water damage of the schools by heavy flood would remain to be further examined. Besides, very low（CV＜1%）and consistent CV (Coefficient of Variation) indicate that there will be of little differences of indoor fungal concentrations among the classrooms of similar settings, based on the site-to-site variation analysis from the 50 investigated elementary schools. We further compare the indoor and outdoor fungal levels in 12 elementary schools of northern, 30 of southern and 8 of central Taiwan. Results showed that the both indoor and outdoor fungal levels were statistically higher in the schools from central regions, compared to northern and southern schools (p value ＜0.01). The same association was also seen in the children daycare centers. Yet, no difference in I/O ratios was observed suggesting the overall similar environmental characteristics from the standpoint of indoor microbial contamination. No particularly high levels of indoor fungi were measured in the water-damaged classrooms when compared to the assumingly non-water-problem classroom (p value = 0.23) from 27 flooded schools. Biochips were analyzed for the identifications of fungal species sampled from the 100 study sites. Analyses showed that Alternaria alternata, Aspergillus spp. and Cladosporium cladosporioides were found the majority of the sampling schools and considered as the most common fungal species in Taiwan. Following was Penicillium spp. found in some schools. Future studies should continue to explore the feasibility of limitation of adopting biochip technology as an effective screening tool for environmental assessment when bio-contamination is of special interest.

fungal contamination, biochip, daycare centers and elementary schools