- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
Ultraviolet light can kill almost all the viruses in a room. Why isn’t it everywhere?::Can special lightbulbs end the next pandemic before it starts?
Ultraviolet light can kill almost all the viruses in a room. Why isn’t it everywhere?::Can special lightbulbs end the next pandemic before it starts?
Because the spectrum required (UV-C) to do so is harmful to humans and the environment. Putting it EVERYWHERE would cause all kinds of problems.
The article blathers on for page after page after page talking about technology is back in the '60s and '70s, an experimental technology using UV wavelengths that supposedly don’t bother humans. And systems that only point up in a room like the UV light isn’t going to get reflected into your eyeballs. I get the feeling the author doesn’t have much of a background and was really just trying to stitch a bunch of research together without really understanding most of it.
You can safely blast the shit out of central air ducts, but it doesn’t do anything for infected breathing viruses into the air sitting next to you or the people that touched the bathroom door handle.
I suspect if we see any real non biased studies come out of any of this equipment the difference will be close to within the error bar.
You’re assuming it’s not more “AI” nonsense though.
I remember back in my childhood reading all kinds of stuff about vampires, aliens and what not in articles starting pretty seriously found through search engines. So the skills to resist human or machine text generators are there, everybody had to develop those.
It’s just that the new (after 2005 or so) majority in the Web considered those skills and many others irrelevant and useless, just like the people and the culture associated with them.
It took a new kind of the same threat to make them take it seriously.
And it was in some way amazing to read something weird created by a human brain. Just like music, it has some kind of “movement”, “direction”, “structure”. “AI”-generated things in comparison to those old texts are like Ludovico Einaudi, no offense to that guy, compared to Vaughan-Williams.
This is the most informed comment in the thread where it’s clear you actually read the damn article.
Some of this does appear to be due to a widespread misunderstanding about how droplets spread disease in the medical field. It was thought that UV light far enough away to be safe would also be too far away to be effective. At least, not without additional ventilation, but ventilation itself would help reduce the spread, and we don’t do that because it’s expensive. UV would be cheap.
Research conducted during Covid corrected this scientific misunderstanding, and UV may be effective without additional ventilation. Ozone effects still need to be studied, though, as well as overall effectiveness. It might be that the additional ozone causes a few hundred additional deaths, but with the tradeoff of thousands or even millions fewer respiratory disease deaths. That would be a worthwhile tradeoff, but we don’t know what those numbers look like.
I can’t really blame people for not reading it, They take a long time to get to the point and they’re not very cohesive even once they get there.
I just read an NIH meta study on ozone and covid about half the studies aren’t very useful, as is always the case with meta studies. It seems, at least with the variant they tested that the virus is not particularly susceptible to oxidation. The one study did note that it slightly lowered It’s ability to infect which may be useful.
Thing is, ozone’s pretty rough even on healthy lungs. I think the main worry is cancer risk over time which is a real bummer.
It’s hard because we’re absolutely walking germ factors and anything strong enough to truly knock out the germs is strong enough to damage us over time.
I wonder is in 100 years will have robots in stores walking around behind us sterilizing everything we touch.
The article itself mentions solutions to the issue of it being harmful to humans, either by putting it at a distance in the ceiling or just running air ventilation through it, or choosing a specific spectrum that apparently doesn’t seem to be harmful due to being blocked by the dead cell layer of one’s skin. The environmental issue though also gets talked about, and is suggested to be more the problem.
Just yesterday, I was defending Lemmy users by saying that they actually do read the article, but here we are.
The article talks about this specifically. Far-UV (222nm) doesn’t penetrate skin or eyes and is harmless to humans. The usual UV-C used for disinfection is 254nm and is quite dangerous.
Will there be any benefit to say putting it in the air duct? Like on a forced air system the main exhaust from the unit (I’m guessing it’s exhaust but that sounds wrong). I know some air filters are supposed to filter out airborne viruses and whatnot but I have no way of testing that. But I know what ultraviolet will do. And I’d have to assume sitting in the metal ductwork wouldn’t really hurt anything.
This article is a longer version of “bleach kills it fast - what if that could be brought inside the body somehow?”