Whaddaya know! Trump jumped the gun but UVC lamps could actually kill Covid-19
Could a new kind of ultraviolet lamps be utilized in stations, airplanes and schools to kill dangerous viruses, learning to be a gamechanger in the COVID-19 fight?
Researchers at Columbia University have been working on such uses for a long time, and the existing pandemic could confirm the worthiness of their efforts.
UVC lamps have long been used to kill bacteria, viruses and molds, notably in hospitals and in the food-processing industry. As the coronavirus pandemic knocks world economies on their heels, this technology is experiencing a boom.
But UVC (for Ultraviolet-C) rays are dangerous, triggering skin cancer and eye problems, and works extremely well only when nobody is present.
THE BRAND NEW York subway system, following a exemplory case of Chinese subways, plans to use ultraviolet lamps to disinfect its trains, but only during nighttime closures.
A team at Columbia’s Center for Radiological Research is tinkering with so-called far-UVC, rays whose wavelength of 222 nanometers makes them safe for humans but still lethal to viruses, the center’s director, David Brenner, told AFP.
At those frequencies, he explained, the rays cannot penetrate the surface of the skin nor of the attention.
That means they could be found in closed and crowded spaces where contamination risks run high, with potentially huge promise for use during the current pandemic.
In late April, President Donald Trump offered confusing remarks about somehow projecting ultraviolet rays into people’s bodies to kill the coronavirus.
He appeared to be inspired by federal research on the consequences of day light on the virus-but day light does not have any UVC rays.
In 2013, the Columbia team commenced studying the potency of far-UVC against drug-resistant bacteria. It next examined the rays’ use against viruses, including the flu virus. Only recently achieved it turn its attention to the coronavirus.
“We were thinking, how do we apply what we are doing to the present situation,” Brenner said.
But to test the impact of UVC on the extremely contagious coronavirus, the team had to go its equipment right into a highly bio-secure laboratory at Columbia.
Experiments completed starting “three-four weeks ago,” Brenner said, have already clarified that UVC rays destroy the virus on surfaces within minutes.
The team next plans to test the lamps on viruses suspended in the air, as when an infected person coughs or sneezes.
In parallel, tests are being conducted to confirm that these rays are harmless to humans.
For 40 weeks now, the lab has exposed mice to far-UVC rays for “eight hours a day, five days weekly, at intensities 20 times greater than we might think about using with humans.”
The results?
After testing the rodents’ eyes and skin, “we've found absolutely nothing; the mice are extremely happy-and very cute aswell,” Brenner said.
The experiment is defined to continue for 20 more weeks.
The findings can't be fully validated by the scientific community until all remaining steps have already been taken, whether or not the team has already submitted its preliminary results to the journal Nature.
‘The world has changed’
But the pressure to reopen the world’s economies is becoming so enormous that factories are accelerating their production of ultraviolet lamps without waiting.
“We actually need something in situations like offices, restaurants, airplanes, hospitals,” Brenner said.
If UVC lamps have already been in commercial use for just two or three years-notably in the gemstone industry, where they can be utilized to tell apart artificial from real gems-potential clients are actually legion, say companies creating them.
“We felt for years this is a great application because of this technology,” said John Yerger, the CEO of Eden Park Illumination, a tiny producer based in Champaign, Illinois.
But with the pandemic, “the world has changed a lot in the last three months,” he added.
And the US Food and Drug Administration has relaxed its regulation of tools or agents that can be used for disinfection, encouraging manufacturers to discover a solution.
“There will be thousands and thousands of these things (UVC lamps) for sure,” Yerger said. “The question is, might it be millions?”
“What we are seeing is a tremendous amount of customer interest” to produce lamps for airlines, cruise lines, restaurants, concert halls and schools, said Shinji Kameda, chief businesses officer in america for Ushio, a Japanese manufacturer.
Production of its 222-nanometer lamps, sold for $500 to $800 and already used in some Japanese hospitals, will be stepped up in October, he said.
For the time being, Brenner said he has been losing sleep.
“I spend nights thinking-if this far-UVC project had started one or two years earlier, maybe we're able to have prevented the COVID-19 crisis,” he said.
“Not completely, but maybe we could have prevented it being truly a pandemic.”
