![]() But after his friend's death, he started to wonder. "I declared my own personal war on superbugs," Brenner said in a TED talk he gave in April 2017.īrenner works at a radiological research facility founded by Marie Curie, where he has long specialized in ionizing radiation, x-rays, and gamma rays-paying little attention to UVC's germicidal properties. ![]() If the studies pan out, "that could really be beneficial in disrupting disease transmission," says Shawn Gibbs, an industrial hygienist who has studied the disinfectant properties of UVC at the Indiana University School of Public Health in Bloomington.īrenner became interested in UVC's germicidal properties 5 years ago, after a friend went to the hospital for a minor surgery and became infected with drug-resistant bacteria that took his life. Unexposed samples could infect the cells, but the UVC-treated ones couldn't, the researchers reported in a preprint study published online 28 December 2017 on bioRxiv. The researchers then collected liquid samples from the chamber and spread them on dog kidney cells susceptible to the flu. The team first aerosolized influenza viruses inside a chamber and exposed them to UVC light with a wavelength of 222 nm or, as a control, to nothing. The researchers found that far UVC eliminated bacteria on surfaces and did not harm lab mice.īrenner and his co-workers next addressed whether far UVC could address a major health concern in many public settings: airborne microbes. So for the past 4 years, a group led by physicist David Brenner at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City has tested shorter wavelengths, known as "far UVC light" that can't penetrate the outer layers of the eyes or skin. ![]() The most commonly used lights have a wavelength of 254 nanometers (nm), which has a relatively short UV wavelength-the so-called "C" category-but can penetrate the skin and eyes, leading to cancers and cataracts. UV lights disinfect by disrupting the molecular bonds that hold together microbial genetic material or proteins. Now, researchers have discovered that people might be safe around a shorter wavelength of microbe-slaying UV light, theoretically turning it into a new tool that could slow the spread of disease in schools, crowded airplanes, food processing plants, and even operating rooms and labs. So UV lights only do their killing in places such as empty operating rooms and under unoccupied lab hoods. Hospitals and laboratories often use ultraviolet (UV) light to kill microbes, but the practice has one major drawback: It can harm humans.
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