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?

  • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • frezik@midwest.socialEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

      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.