Destroying Viruses with Far UV light
Once feelings and reasoning calmed down a little bit after the COVID pandemic, one is left with the knowledge that we’re doing a pretty poor job with the accelerating evolution of Viruses. Why accelerating, you ask?
- we’re far more people than previously,
- we live closer together, and anything that can spread through contagion can now spread worldwide without any issues.
- Hence, viruses can iterate far more quickly than before in finding the optimal solution in their particular solution space,
- In many cases, we live closer with animals we previously did not have contact with, giving zoonoses a much bigger chance to happen.
During the pandemic, there was a small time window in which some entrepreneurs saw a chance1) to innovate on upgrading our game against viruses.
One thing was trying to use UV light against viruses. The use of UV light is hardly a new thing - it has been in use for quite some time eg in the food industries to ensure that meat does not contract any bacteria.
This works pretty well, however UV light is also aggressive against our skin cells and our eyes, such that it is problematic using that method of protection in locations where humans are walking around.
Even so, research has found that we can have both destruction of fairly unprotected DNA while not piercing our skin and eye cells when we use light of even higher frequency.
The frequency of visible light is often denoted in nanometers, since there is a direct relationship between a light’s frequency (f) and the distance between peaks (the wavelength, denoted lambda). That relationship is
With c being the speed of light. The wavelength of UV light is in the 100-400 nanometer2) range. The wavelength that research has been interested in is around 222 nanometers. Some studies about this can be found here and here. Apparently the technology was pioneered at Columbia University.
The trick is that the frequency is so high that it cannot penetrate the upper layer of the skin as well as the eyes.
When you search for products that use that kind of light you find a couple of products…
All in all still quite some cutting edge stuff and pretty expensive, but I have the feeling that if governments would actually care about public health it would be a very promising avenue to pursue to reduce the viral load in public spaces, schools, etc. considerably. If you think about it in terms of reduced loss of working hours, fewer sick teachers, fewer sick school kids and again by extension their parents / aka employees and fewer evolutionary cycles of viruses it all feels like a no-brainer to heavily invest in this.
Alas, we are apes who managed to frame basic public health issues as a damn culture war.
1) The interest in avoiding getting sick is so low that such innovations have a hard time getting anywhere. Seriously, the most surprising thing in the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic to me was how little interest people have in avoiding getting sick.
2) 1 nanometer is the millionth part of a millimeter. By the way, a virus’ size is also measured in tens to hundreds of nanometers. Hence, light whose wavelength is in that size range will “interact” very well with such objects :)