Aviation Hygiene

the branch of hygiene that studies the hygienic problems arising with the development of military and civil aviation. The first works on aviation hygiene were published between 1910 and 1920. In the next decade there appeared the original investigations of N. M. Dobrotvorskii on the hygiene of the pilot’s work space, the work patterns and standards of aviation work, nutritional hygiene, aviation apparel, and protection against occupational hazards.

The principal task of aviation hygiene is to study the influences of environmental factors on the bodies of the flying and engineering-technical staff, as well as the effects of aviation devices on passengers’ bodies. One of the tasks of aviation hygiene is to study the characteristics of the work of the flyer and the technical staff in order to establish a rational pattern of labor, rest and nutrition, and hygienic measures for work on radar installations and for situations in which there is contact with fuels and lubricants and corrosive materials and liquids. Included in the tasks of aviation hygiene is hygienic provision for various types of flights, such as high-altitude, bad-weather, night, and prolonged flights. Problems of protecting humans from hypoxia, drops in barometric pressure, and other hazards are worked out in connection with flights at supersonic speeds and flights in the stratosphere. Traditional problems of aviation hygiene have undergone further study in connection with the hygiene problems of space flights—special means of protecting humans from the unfavorable influence of cosmic space factors and the establishment in the cabin of the spacecraft of conditions necessary to preserve the life and work efficiency of the human being. It has become necessary to study the new problems of the influence of weightlessness, protection against radiation dangers, safety during takeoff and landing of the spacecraft, and preservation of life and work efficiency upon debarkation on another planet.

Aviation hygiene as an independent branch of hygiene was established in the USSR after the organization in 1935 of the I. P. Pavlov Institute of Aviation Medicine (in Moscow) of the RKKA (Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army). In subsequent years aviation hygiene has been studied in the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine, the S. M. Kirov Academy of Military Medicine (Leningrad), the department of aviation medicine of the State Scientific Research Institute of Civil Aviation of the USSR, and other institutions. The study of various hygienic problems and instruction in the elements of aviation hygiene are conducted in all countries with military and civil aviation.

Physicians specializing in aviation hygiene are trained in the subdepartment of aviation medicine of the Central Institute for Advanced Training of Physicians (Moscow) and at the S. M. Kirov Academy of Military Medicine. Problems of aviation and space hygiene are treated in the Voennomeditsinskii zhurnal (Journal of Military Medicine; 1823 to the present); in the journals Gigiena i sanitariia (Hygiene and Sanitation; 1936 to the present); Voprosy pitaniia (Problems of Nutrition; 1932 to the present), Kosmicheskaia biologiia i meditsina (Space Biology and Medicine; 1967 to the present), and Aviatsiia i kosmonavtika (Aviation and Astronautics; 1918 to the present); and also in the collected series Problems of Space Biology (1962 to the present) published by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.