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autotldr Bot ,

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.

The original article contains 4,104 words, the summary contains 252 words. Saved 94%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

just_another_person ,

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.

CarbonIceDragon ,
@CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social avatar

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.

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

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.

db2 ,

You're assuming it's not more "AI" nonsense though.

rottingleaf ,

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.

frezik ,

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.

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

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.

SuperIce ,

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.

frezik ,

Just yesterday, I was defending Lemmy users by saying that they actually do read the article, but here we are.

scarabic ,

This article is a longer version of “bleach kills it fast - what if that could be brought inside the body somehow?”

bigkahuna1986 ,

Just eat a tide pod and wash it down with some bleach!

CaptPretentious ,

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.

dugmeup ,

Do you want Ultraviolet resistant viruses?

surewhynotlem ,

Do you want tardigrades? Because this is how you get tardigrades.

dugmeup ,

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

SuperIce ,

IDK, I kinda like tardigrades.

surewhynotlem ,

Me too. I think we should do this.

nokturne213 ,
@nokturne213@sopuli.xyz avatar

If i had a tardigrade i could fly my mushroom spaceship.

EmergMemeHologram ,

Without bothering to read the article, I look forward to sunburning my retinas like im at a crypto rave.

CarbonIceDragon ,
@CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social avatar

The article does mention the issue of safety and how to address it actually

jonne ,

To be fair, nobody complained about getting COVID from that event.

maness300 ,

What if, and hear me out,

What if...

What if... we just ran them when people weren't in the room? 🤯

Crazy what happens when you can come up with your own thoughts instead of parroting reddit comments ad nauseam.

CustodialTeapot ,

Lemmy users don't respond well to reasonable criticism or facts.

Only toxic and stupid comments allowed.

DreadPotato ,
@DreadPotato@sopuli.xyz avatar

What if... we just ran them when people weren't in the room?

This is already a thing in many hospitals, and has been used extensively even before covid.

kent_eh ,

And there are also UV systems that can be added to air ducts to kill off airborne pathogens as well. But they're not cheap and not commonly used outside of medical facilities.

skillissuer ,
@skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

What if, i know, crazy idea but what if you read the fucking article in question?

frezik ,

Won't work in spaces where people are around all day, like offices, but it doesn't matter. The eye and skin dangers are already addressed for the most part. The major remaing question is ozone and the VOCs it combines with.

theneverfox ,

Ozone is a concern (it's bad to breathe it), as is using it as a cheap way to do less proper ventilation

It also wouldn't do much for things like COVID, where ventilation does help

pearable ,

Joke aside, looks like they're using a higher bandwidth of light, 222nm compared to more common 254nm uv for medical uses. It doesn't penetrate the skin or eyes sufficiently to cause damage.

WeirdGoesPro ,
@WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

But will it activate my transitions lenses so I look like a cool guy wearing sunglasses indoors?

scarabic ,

And bleaching all materials in the room. And slowly destroying anything made of paper or plastic or wood.

reversebananimals ,

I'd like to know which 12 users upvoted this so that I can block them all.

weew , (edited )

"X can kill gems! Why don't we use X everywhere?"

X: Thing that can kill humans too. And/or cause cancer.

See also:

  • Fire

  • chlorine gas

  • dehydration

  • Boiling water

  • Radiation

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

But what if we just inject the bleach? Or what if we just shine the light on the inside?

XeroxCool ,

I'm so tired of this misrepresented quote. He said take the blood out, THEN bleach it. Covid deaths would drop overnight but y'all ain't ready for that talk

4am ,

Boy, this is the internet.

If you’re being sarcastic you better throw a /s on there because no one can tell in 2024 if your a chucklehead or if you’re high on Ivermectin.

XeroxCool ,

Omitting the /s is the only roulette I play

Shdwdrgn ,

"I see disinfectant, where it knocks it [coronavirus] out in a minute—one minute—and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it [coronavirus] gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that."

There is nothing in his quote about taking taking the blood out first, he's talking about doing the cleaning inside the body. But lets assume for a brief moment that what you say is accurate, and someone is going to take out your blood and clean it with bleach.... THEN what? Now your blood is too toxic to put back in the body. Do you just kick back for a minimum of 24 hours while waiting for the chlorine to evaporate? It doesn't work if you only take out some of the blood, because it is constantly being mixed in your body, so you have to somehow completely drain a person without them dying. Now repeat that for 8 billion people, because this process would still do nothing to protect you from getting exposed again as soon as you walk in to a store.

You might also consider how covid would have gotten into the blood in the first place -- it entered the body through the lungs, and continues to grow there (which is why some many people had lung damage). So I guess while you're killing the patient by removing all their blood, you might as well take out the lungs and bleach them too? Who here can't hold their breath for 24+ hours? There's just no way any of this could ever be used as a serious treatment. Yeah covid deaths would drop overnight, but only because the "treatment" would have a 100% fatality rate.

bonnetbee ,

I guess the comment you are replying to was ment as a joke. But at the same time I was hoping Trump was joking, but here we are.

Shdwdrgn ,

Unfortunately there are people who really believe this way. The same people who think Trump is some sort of god and can do no wrong.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

😐

jballs ,
@jballs@sh.itjust.works avatar

Exactly. You can live the rest of your life without blood.

jonne ,

Don't forget bleach!

morrowind ,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

tbh I wouldn't mind running some of my stuff through a cleansing by fire ritual once in a while

Venator ,

It worked for Thích Quảng Đức !

rottingleaf ,

Just use sarine FFS, that'll teach them little invisible bastards

RaincoatsGeorge ,

We use uv light stands in the hospital. We will shut down a room and run a uv sanitizer for a bit. It works in some instances but it's not exactly something you can just leave running all the time. Everyone would probably have a sick tan tho.. To go with their skin cancer..

SuperIce ,

Those are 254nm. Far-UV is 222nm, which doesn't penetrate or damage skin or the eyes and seems to be completely safe to humans. The main issue is that it can generate ozone, but how significant that is is currently unknown.

Bjornir ,

Ozone is also used to disinfect, that's double the disinfection power!!!

SnotFlickerman ,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

A bit of the old Ultraviolence, eh?

iAvicenna , (edited )
@iAvicenna@lemmy.world avatar

Ultraviolance: solution to anything and everything (ps: this would make a very good name for a custom minigun)

the_q ,

If all humans died there wouldn't be anyone getting sick at all from anything!

Axxi ,

I found the A.I.!!!
Get'em!

MTK ,

Why not inject UV as a cure for all virus infections!

This way it wont reach our eyes or skin so no problems!

curiousaur ,

Because it burns you. That's the answer. It kills your skin cells and eyes the same way it kills the bacteria. Also, it is everywhere, it's fucking outside. The sun. Fucking stupid. Idiots.

Know what else kills bacteria? Bleach. So get chugging.

So stupid.

frezik ,

Read the article. These problems are addressed.

Buffalox ,

At this point, it’s clear that in small-scale settings, far-UV can kill the vast majority of pathogens present, which in turn would vastly reduce the risk of respiratory disease spread. It seems safe for human skin, and likely safe for human eyes, too.

Luckily we are more thick skinned than a bacteria, who would have thought?

Dadifer ,

Um, I'm going to copy a comment I made elsewhere:

Dude, read the article. The whole point is it uses shorter wavelengths so it doesn't penetrate your skin or cornea.

Unlike me with your mom.

onlyhalfminotaur ,

Imagine not reading the article and having this much confidence in your terrible response.

magnor ,
@magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh avatar

The issue with stuff that kills everything is that... Well it kills everything.

Buffalox ,

At this point, it’s clear that in small-scale settings, far-UV can kill the vast majority of pathogens present, which in turn would vastly reduce the risk of respiratory disease spread. It seems safe for human skin, and likely safe for human eyes, too.

Luckily we are more thick skinned than a bacteria, who would have thought?

magnor ,
@magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh avatar

That is indeed news to me! Wild stuff.

Life_inst_bad ,

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.

skillissuer ,
@skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Pretty counterintuitive that in order to make UV less dangerous for humans, you can make it more ionizing. Anyway, I'd expect problems with degradation/yellowing of plastics, bleaching of everything in range, and massive issues with indoor ozone and some other forms of air pollution

Dadifer ,

I'm a little confused about the ozone because I know multiple people that have literal ozone makers in their home.

BakerBagel ,

Because people are morons who will snort straight asbestos because some quack said it is healthy for them.

Ozone is super unstable and will oxidize most organic compounds. It's great in the upper atmosphere where it absorbs deadly UV rays, but it is super dangerous to be inhaling regularly.

JustZ ,
@JustZ@lemmy.world avatar

Right, but only a little bit in occupied spaces is safe. Takes a lot to oxidize stable compounds.

BakerBagel ,

It forms radicals which will self perpetuate. A machine constantly putting out even small quantities of ozone is going to fuck you up sooner rather than later.

Cihta ,
@Cihta@lemmy.world avatar

Can you elaborate a little more? I used to have an ozone generator but, and it's been a long time, it seemed that at useful levels it would be dangerous but what are "small quantities"? I have however found them useful to be used at high power for a short time to clear a car or house of smoke of pet odor (unoccupied of course).

I use the pool ones to keep water tanks sterile with an ORP meter for control and that seems to work well but it is extremely corrosive. It breaks down really fast though so I don't think it's causing any harm... Is it?

BakerBagel ,

The EPA is pretty adamant that there are no health benefits to ozone machines, and plenty of potential drawbacks. . Ozone breaks down fast because it is highly volatile and is just ask likely to react with tissues in your lungs as whatever you want to clean out of the air.

Cihta ,
@Cihta@lemmy.world avatar

Thanks for reply but yeah we are in agreement. That's why I quit using it like 2 decades ago. If it can destroy organic matter that obviously includes ours.

I was just curious on the quantity thing. A general air blown ozone generator will not hurt if at low power. It obviously won't provide any benefits either. But for water it's useful so was curious if you knew something i didn't.

On topic - a powerful UV lamp (not something you'd want to hit your eyes) in your central AC is still very useful. Airborne stuff, mold spores, etc. at a minimum it keeps the coils clean.

JustZ ,
@JustZ@lemmy.world avatar

I run the ozone machine for a half hour or an hour here and there, when nobody is around, and in spaces that are well ventilated afterward. What sort of radicals?

BakerBagel ,

Radicals are atoms with a missing electron. Since most chemical reactions use pairs of electrons. Free radicals are atoms, typically oxygen, that have this missing electron. They are super reactive and will steal an electron from the first atom or molecule they can. That atom/molecule then goes and repeats the process, creating a chain of radicals that can mess up your tissues. Typically our body uses anti-oxidants to halt radical chains, but it is very intense and can only be done so much. That ozone machine has no benefits and loads of potential drawbacks.

Buddahriffic ,

So then it's perfect in homes where we are using bulbs that output deadly UV rays!

skillissuer ,
@skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

people are fucking morons, i guess they got sold on altmed hype on this one (mostly)

Wahots ,
@Wahots@pawb.social avatar

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.

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