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?

218 points

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

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69 points

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

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24 points

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

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14 points

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.

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1 point

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

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4 points

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

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-15 points

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.

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16 points
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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.

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1 point

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.

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9 points

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.

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5 points

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

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2 points

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

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-26 points
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Lemmy users don’t respond well to reasonable criticism or facts.

Only toxic and stupid comments allowed.

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1 point
Deleted by creator
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168 points
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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.

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42 points

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.

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12 points

You’re assuming it’s not more “AI” nonsense though.

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5 points

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.

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4 points

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.

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1 point

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.

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17 points

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.

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11 points

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

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3 points

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.

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1 point

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.

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0 points

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

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0 points

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

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68 points
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“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

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42 points

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

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5 points

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

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18 points

“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.

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14 points

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.

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2 points

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

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1 point

😐

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6 points

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

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-2 points

It worked for Thích Quảng Đức !

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4 points

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

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3 points

Don’t forget bleach!

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54 points

“Hydroflouric Acid can kill almost all viruses in a bowl. Why aren’t we eating it?”

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5 points

And a handgun can kill all viruses in a Petri dish

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1 point

Ah, a fellow user of the Kitchen Gun? Good to meet you

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2 points

I prefer Toilet Grenade.

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1 point
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1 point

The people who have are not around anymore.

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40 points

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.

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7 points

Yo what?! You have a link about that retina destroying conference?

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14 points

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/06/guests-bored-ape-event-hong-kong-vision-problems

It was a Bored Ape event "ApeFest’ in November. They used harmful UV bulbs instead of regular black light for decoration.

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1 point

That’s wild! Appreciate the follow up.

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4 points

People think I’m nuts when I wear sunglasses on cloudy days, but my eyes hurt. Idk why they don’t hurt the same way sunny days, probably I don’t squint when it’s not so sunny.

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1 point

Probably the scattering effect of the clouds. Instead of light coming from one direction, which you can angle away from to reduce intensity, the diffused light from the clouds is bouncing every which way. Which while making the intensity less, instead keeps it constant no matter where you face. I often wear sunglasses while driving on cloudy days for similar reasons.

Basically, looking at direct sunlight will obviously be more damaging, but diffused light doesn’t give you a break.

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