Ultraviolet light can kill almost all the viruses in a room. Why isn’t it everywhere?
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 it's great at killing things, including human skin. Seriously, my local gym has people practically sign their life away before letting them into a UV-A/B tanning booth. No way are you putting the even worse UV-C bulbs out in public. That's how people got their retinas fried at a crypto conference in Hong Kong last year.
UV light is both: A. Damaging to eyesight. B. Invisible.
You won't know how much damage you're doing to yourself until the damage has been done. This is how you give mass amounts of people eye trauma, and potentially blindness.
UV light is regularly used on HVAC systems and water purification systems.
There are systems used in hospitals that are automated which will roll into an empty room and then turn on to disinfect the room. They are usually used in hospitals but I’ve seen them used in places like China during their zero covid crackdown on public transportation.
Some transit systems in China even converted a paint booths to disinfect with UV so they could drive buses through. All of which is probably overkill as prolonged exposure to sunlight will do the same thing.
Exposure to UV light that is intense enough to kill viruses within seconds is very bad for humans. I pulled the cover off a system I was taking marketing pictures for while it was turned on. Within a thirty to sixty seconds I could feel like I was getting a sunburn on my arm that was closest to the light. I wouldn’t want to risk a direct UV system turning on while someone is sleeping and burning them. As a result most systems are indirect and rely on a combination of UV and HEPA filters to disinfect airborne viruses.
There are other ways to disinfect surfaces. Bleach or chlorine is cheap, simple and won’t harm humans. Chlorine gas can be used to kill really bad viruses like anthrax. Chlorine gas was used to disinfect the Federal buildings that had been contaminated in the 2001 anthrax attacks. Many detail shops, rental car agencies and public transit systems in the US use Chlorine gas on vehicles to disinfect or more commonly remove nasty odors from vehicles. The gas can seep into all cracks/crevices and get into the HVAC system ductwork in ways UV light can not. If you ever get into a car that faintly smells like a pool, chances are it has been gassed recently to kill an odor.
Jeez, every response in here is about it burning your eyes. Thing is, people aren't in every room all the time. Have it set to a sensor, same as the lights, and you can quickly sanitize large spaces that are unoccupied. Elevators, airplanes, etc can be sanitized the second they're empty. My FIL is a retired GE engineer working on this technology.
Did anyone actually read the article? The only guy whose question wasn't already answered by the article was the one about yellowed plastics, lol.
Oof, ultraviolet light. This makes me flashback to April 2020, shortly after the U.S. shutdown for the Coronavirus pandemic.
If you have 1:57 minutes of free time, watch this video of former President Donald Trump addressing the nation on the response to the novel coronavirus.
Warning: If you experience second-hand embarassment, try not to watch Dr. Birx in the background squirm in her seat as she sits through the idiot rambling of the orange man. Immediately after this press conference, corporations and media companies pushed out critical warnings to Americans to not drink or inject disinfectants like bleach.
- YouTube link: https://youtu.be/BalDN6iGYpE
- Piped link (privacy-respecting frontend for YouTube): https://piped.video/watch?v=BalDN6iGYpE
~~Because that is specifically UV-C and it's harmful to humans too. ~~
~~for example: https://wwd.com/eye/parties/hypebeast-party-uv-lights-injuries-11036559/~~
Correction: the article is about even smaller wavelength UV which is not as harmful to humans, my bad.
I worked for a company that made a UVC light system for sterilization. The amount of safety you have to build in so people wont nuke themselves makes them hard to use.Also, the bulbs we used were delicate and had issues constantly.
This is the dumbest shit. It kills all kinds of stuff, not just bad viruses. Homes are covered in bacteria which you've adapted to and are helpful. Kind of like gut bacteria, but outside your body. Killing all of them isn't a good idea.
An actually halfway decent idea might be adding a strong UV light inside the washing machine or dryer to kill germs. Modern eco methords with 30-40 C° just dont kill the germs effectively. You'd need to wash your clothes at last at 60C° which most clothes (especially sports wear) cant handle anymore. Or just dry them on the outside where we also have a Strong UV source aka. The sun.
Not necessarily agreeing with the article posted, but for all the people who clearly didn't read the article:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-08462-z
That's just one paper I found searching for far-UV. Seems to be many more.
Again not saying it's 100 % safe or anything, but it looks promising.
The bulbs don't last very long last time I looked into this for home use
I always thought these were pretty cool. I'm not sure how HEV compares to UV though, or if it even works
UV light kills almost all viruses because it's ionizing EM radiation. So it also fucks humans up, xd. I mean just stay on sunlight naked for a day. Your body will be so happy. All the mutations from ionizing radiation would be great.
But yeah we life in a society where ppl is scared of Radiofrequency EM waves (non-ionizing), "dangerous cell phone towers, wifi dangerous". That same people recomends staying long periods of time with direct sunlight contact without protection (yeah we need protection because sunlight spectrum has UV and higher freq ionizing radiation).
Sunlight healthy/radio waves dangerous, that is the most stupid statement ever.
Sunlight is beneficial in small dosis because of how we syntetise vitamins (as little as i know). But remeber if you are scared of microwaves, remeber that sunlight has much more higher freq(higher energy) waves.
That’s how you get UV resistant strains of all kinds of microbes
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Ultraviolet retained a small coterie of enthusiasts over the ensuing decades, focused narrowly on preventing transmission of tuberculosis — which has no reliably effective vaccine for adults — in its remaining hotbeds, like homeless shelters.
The biggest test it received, the Tuberculosis Ultraviolet Shelter Study of 1997-2004, demonstrated that “upper room” UV, in which UV-emitting lamps are placed at least 6.9 feet above the floor where they can disinfect air without harming humans, was safe.
It wasn’t — detective work from scholars including Linsey Marr, Jose-Luis Jimenez, and Katherine Randall in the middle of the pandemic determined that this conclusion was based on a misinterpretation of the Wellses’ research that had somehow persisted for decades in the medical profession.
“This is the most difficult talk I’ve had to give in my career,” Jose-Luis Jimenez, a distinguished professor of chemistry at the University of Colorado, told the audience at the first International Congress on Far-UVC Science and Technology this past June.
But 2020 was also an unusually brutal year for airborne disease: 49,783 Americans died from influenza in 2019, for instance (and none from Covid); 1 percent of that number is about 500 people, which starts to feel comparable to the air pollution cost Jimenez identifies.
Jimenez favors using UV in very high-risk locations, such as hospitals, but worries that construction companies, schools, malls, and the like will seize on the potential of far-UV as an excuse not to invest in proper ventilation and filtration, leaving us with the ugly trade-off he identifies.
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Shadows.
You really dont want to live in a sterile environment, you actually need some stimulation to your immune and other bodily systems. Most body stuff is like muscles including the immune system - when you regularly over load and stress them, thats the impulse to stimulate growth and evolving.
Because my curtains are closed
Why not inject UV as a cure for all virus infections!
This way it wont reach our eyes or skin so no problems!
I'd like to know which 12 users upvoted this so that I can block them all.