In January 2024, I wrote a great piece on a relatively new and very promising approach to combat respiratory diseases such as COVID, Tuberculosis and Flus. It is called “FAR-UVC”, a type of ultraviolet light, at wavelengths of approximately 200 to 235 nanometers, which can kill the permanent majority of the aerial pathogens he points out, without a human damING or Eyes The Wayer-Wavger Waver Waver Wvergelgh.
The potential here is massive. Imagine being able to place some lamps in key rooms where disease transmission is common, such as schools and nurseries, hospitals, retail stores and offices, and kills most of the diseases that are spreading through the air. The benefits, both in the Imeated Public Health and in the ability to avoid the spread of pandemics and Covid in their early days, would be massive. The lamps can kill more than 99.9 percent of Covid viruses in the air, and would be equally effective against new outbreaks that spread through the air.
So why don’t we have UVC in operation at this time? There are at least two main factors that retain technology to date, but in the year and a half since my piece came out, we have promising information about both.
At this time, if you want to obtain an ultraviolet light of 222 Nm (the standard for FAR-UVC), it needs what is called an Excimer lamp. These work in the way in which fluorescent bulbs do it: placing an electric charge in a tube that contains a gas, forcing gas to emit light. You can use different gases and elements that interact to obtain different light wavelengths; In FAR-UVC, the usual combination is Krypton and chlorine gas.
This approach has some problems. Krypton chloride lamps produce Mostly 222 nm of light, but not exclusive. Excimer lamps should include filters to avoid emitting other wavelengths; Some filters work better than others, and a malfunction filter could be a safety risk by letting the most dangerous wavelengths pass. Kripton-clloride tubes do not last forever and have to be replaced periodically, increasing the price of UVC disinfection.
The dream, then, has been “solid state” lamps. These woods would the gas approach in a tube in favor of the mechanisms that emit only a specific wavelength of the light. The most prominent approach to date has leg LEDs, such as those used on computer/TV screens and modern bulbs. LEDs become less efficient the shorter the wavelength it uses, which raises a challenge. That said, we did this everything that emits light blue, which is at the short end of the visible light spectrum.
The great news of this week, thought, is in another approach: second harmonic. Basically, it can design crystals that, when the lasers shoot through them, double the frequency of laser light, which moves at half the wavelength. So, if you shoot a blue laser of 444 nm in an appropriate glass, you get exactly 222 nm of distant light.
Leaving Stealth this month, Uviquity, a Raleight headquarters tied to a group of veteran photonic engineers and backed with $ 6.6 million in seed money, told me that they have this process working in their laboratory. Blue lasers are an old technology at this point (where the name of Blu-ray comes from), and have a mature supply chain, which means that building them is relatively cheap and easy.
The crystal that uses uviquity is made of aluminum nituro, which is not exactly difficult to achieve: “Aluminum is abundant and nitrogen is abundant,” as CEO Scott Burrowghs told me. “It does not require completely new technology or infrastructure to build thesis devices,” Burroughs continued. “Once we realized that we also realized how well positioned this would be to climb very quickly.”
It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this child of the distant UVC issuer, once it goes to the market. It could allow distant UVC lamps to see cost reductions that reflect the drastic drops seen in LEDs and other chips over the years. Making the disinfection of distant UVC exponentially cheaper could begin to make the idea the mainstream and speed adoption.
A large part of FAR-UVC appeal is that, unlike the greater UV wavelength, which can cause solar burns, cataracts and worse -Far-UCU-UVC is safe for humans’s eyes and skins. But its effect on air quality has a less clear leg. As I explained in my piece:
When the distant light of UV reaches oxygen molecules, it breaks some of them to form Better O3 known as ozone. The ozone itself is dangerous and responsible for about 365,000 deaths a year worldwide. Ozone also interacts with volatile organic compounds (VOC), small carbon -based molecules suspended in the air … These compounds interact with ozone to create particles. And individuals in the air, basically, can also kill.
That sounds bad, but basic chemistry leaves many important questions without response. How much ozone and private pollution do UVC lamps in practice? How difficult is it for ventilation to clarify that? Are additional exposure levels large enough to be a great concern?
There is still much we don’t know here. As explained by a new report of the Blueprint Biosecury research group, much of the uncertainty about UVC related to UVC is really uncertainty about why ozone is bad for you.
If the effect of ozone on mortality is because or ozone itself, then ventilation rooms inside could be harpul; There is more ozone outside than inside, and better ventilation would simply throw it inside. But if ozone is harmful because it creates other secondary pollutants, then ventilation is a good idea.
We do not know, and that makes it difficult to understand the best way to use technologies such as FAR-UVC and very difficult ventilation.
That said, some new investigations are tentatively more optimistic that the effects of distant UVC ozone are not consequently large. A recent article studied an office where a UVC lamp was placed (as recommended by the manufacturer) or four (well above the recommendations). The individual lamp did nothing to ozone levels or particles in the room. The four lamps did. The conclusion, then, is that if used in moderation, distant UVC lamps could perfect without ruining the inner air.
Another document found the fashion of ozone levels with a single distant UVC lamp, but discovered that if the lamp is placed on the roof, minimizes exposure to humans and maximizes the cash of the lamp by disinfecting the air.
These are still the first days for the UVC, both in the engineering challenge of designing profitable lamps and in the epidemiological challenge of understanding its effects on the air. What we need more than anything is an additional investigation.
But I am modestly safer than last year that we headed towards a world where thesis lamps are ubiquitous. Possible pandemic threats, such as aviar flu, or even a new dangerous respiratory virus designed in a laboratory with the help of AI, would face a new formidable enemy that can kill them in the air. With luck, in 10 or 20 years, children’s flus, tuberculous infections and even pandemic viruses could wilt due to the efforts of this new weapon.