Deep Dive
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This podcast brought to you by Ring. With Ring cameras, you can check on your pets to catch them in the act. Izzy, drop that. Or just keep them company. Make sure they're okay while you're away. With Ring. Learn more at ring.com slash pets. In 1937, two researchers had a kind of dangerous idea. So they figured the perfect place to test it out was in an elementary school. On kids. On the eve of a massive epidemic.
At this point, scientists had already known for decades that ultraviolet light could kill bacteria in test tubes or on surfaces.
But William and Mildred Wells, this husband and wife team, they had a theory that went way beyond established science. They thought infectious diseases might be able to linger in the air for hours, which would mean that what happened to bacteria in test tubes or on countertops barely even mattered. So the Wellses came up with a way to try and kill bacteria in the air.
The idea was that air would go through these things they called irradiation chambers. UV rays would blast the air and it would kill off the pathogens. Dylan Matthews wrote about this experiment for Vox. That led into an effort by the Welles' to do an actual pilot.
at a kind of posh private school in Philadelphia. And what they did is they put these things under the ceilings in classrooms. The Wellses took these things, these irradiation chambers, which could look like long rectangular air conditioning units or hanging metal UFOs, and they put them in a few homerooms. And they had the good luck as scientists to do this in the middle of a measles epidemic. So it was the best possible time to test if this worked.
This was back when there were almost a million measles cases a year in the U.S. So the Wellses could just compare the classrooms that had the UV lamps against ones that didn't. And they found that in classrooms where they were doing this, about 14.5% of students got measles. In classrooms where they weren't doing this, 55.3%. So this was a really, really effective way of killing off measles that was just in the air.
The Wellses started wondering whether UV light might be a game changer for respiratory diseases in general. Things like measles or the flu or tuberculosis, which are still killing millions of people every year. But William passed away before their ideas really caught on. And the idea that there was just sort of disease all around us in the air, that there were sort of aerosolized viruses and bacteria sounded kind of unscientific.
In the decades since the Welles' experiment, scientists have accepted that a few things like tuberculosis and measles might be able to linger in the air for a while. But they thought those were the exceptions that prove the rule, that in general, diseases don't live in the air. That was kind of the dominant view until COVID, essentially as we realized that you don't have to have it spat at you. It can just suspend in the air around you and infect you.
And if that's true, and if that's true about a lot of respiratory diseases, that makes sort of controlling the air around us seem a lot more important than we had thought it was before 2020. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and this week on Unexplainable, could a century-old hunch about ultraviolet light save us from respiratory diseases like COVID or the flu or TB? And if so, what's the catch? ♪
So Dylan, let's just start really simple here. What is UV light exactly? So if you've seen a rainbow, that's sort of visible light being split into all the colors. And so on one end you have red, on the other end you have violet. But there's stuff beyond red and there's stuff beyond violet. And ultraviolet is the stuff beyond violet. It has wavelengths just out of the range that people's eyes can see. And how does ultraviolet light kill bacteria?
So ultraviolet light is very good at mutating DNA. It causes cancerous cells to grow out of control, but it can also work on viruses since viruses aren't much more than DNA. And so their ability to replicate and spread can be really seriously diminished. And the Welles' installed this in classrooms? Right. So UV is definitely bad in high doses and in certain forms for humans.
It's what gives us sunburns. It causes a lot of skin cancer. But the reasoning was that if you put this high enough in the room, you're not blasting it directly at kids. That's why they did what's called an upper room design. So the logic was that the air above you eventually becomes the air in front of you. And that's imperfect. You don't get the air that's directly in front of people. It can be hard to install for people who aren't very specialized.
But in the last decade or so, scientists have been experimenting with a slightly different kind of UV that has slightly shorter wavelengths. And they're trying to do the very thing that the Wells has tried not to do, which is blast it directly at people. The hope is that this new kind of light is strong enough to kill viruses and bacteria, but not strong enough to hurt humans. And this has come to be known as far UV or low wavelength UV.
Why would lower wavelength UV be dangerous to viruses and not dangerous to us? I think a major aspect of why there's a difference is how deep it can penetrate. The longer wavelength can get through the layer of dead skin cells that we all have just on the top surface of our skin. It can get through our eyes. And I guess it works on viruses because they're not covered in a layer of dead skin. Right. They're tiny and they're defenseless.
So who's kind of spearheading this new research into low wavelength UV? So I think the person who really jumpstarted this is a guy named David Brenner, who's a medical physicist at Columbia. The actual history, if you're interested in how I got into it, was that a potential donor approached the dean at Columbia a decade or so ago.
Her husband had died of a surgical site infection and the issue is drug resistant bacteria. So the Dean called a few of us together and said, "Got any ideas?" And we came up with this notion of using lower wavelength UV light
The nice thing about UV is it kills viruses and bacteria pretty indiscriminately. So it's hard to build up a resistance to it because it's, what are you going to do, not have DNA? It's important. Yeah, it's fairly crucial for their whole deal. And Brenner and his colleagues started realizing that the shorter wavelength version might actually be safe for people and that it could, at the same time, kill these viruses and bacteria in the air.
How well does low wavelength UV actually work? So the evidence that this kills viruses and bacteria is extremely strong. There have been studies where you do things like pump in staph bacteria into a room really, really fast while these lamps are going. It kills the bacteria.
Even pretty low doses of this stuff will kill 99.9% of COVID if you test it in a test chamber. It's about 95% effective against swine flu. It works basically against whatever you want to throw it against. And do we have any actual evidence that it's safe to get low wavelength UV blasted at you? So...
We have a bunch of studies estimating what happens when you blast this at skin, when you blast it at hair and eyes on both humans and mice. And it's pretty consistent that nothing happens. This is too weak to give you a sunburn, much less give you skin cancer. It doesn't seem to cause eye irritation of any kind. UNED is
A researcher has worked on this in Scotland. Did an amazing study where he just like exposed himself to increasingly heavy concentrations of UV light on his arm. Oh, okay. And the most that he could get it to do is to like yellow and look weird. So he took his own arm and exposed it to this type of low wavelength UV? This was a self-trial. I think it's a little easier to get through ethics boards if you're doing it just to yourself. Yeah.
And is yellowing bad? No, there's no medical reason to be yellowing.
mad that your skin is yellow. It looks odd, but it's not a risk factor for cancer or skin disease or anything. And do we have any reason to believe this might be dangerous over a longer time? It's definitely still an ongoing area of research. Edian and some co-authors did a study where they put the shorter wavelength UV into a classroom and randomized who got exposed to it and then sent out questionnaires asking people if their eyes were uncomfortable.
didn't seem to make any difference. Brenner and his colleagues did a study in mice. We kept the hairless mice in their houses for basically a year, eight hours a day, five days a week. We exposed them to lower wavelength UV light and did lots of tests, eye tests and skin tests. And they didn't find any changes to skin or eyes. At the end of the story, we basically didn't see any effects relative to the controls.
which didn't get any exposure. So I think the evidence that directly getting hit by it is safe is really strong. The question is what happens to the air around you, and that's where the answers are a lot less clear. What does UV do to the air? So...
The main worry about this is what happens to oxygen and then other particles in the air when you blast it with UV. And I think the scientist who's been raising the most alarms about this is a guy at Colorado named Jose Luis Jimenez. So now, how much does UV help? Yeah, it helps, but it also now creates pollution. So when you blast UV at oxygen, oxygen molecules tend to bond to each other and form ozone, which is when three oxygen atoms are bonded together.
Ozone is itself bad for us to inhale, but it also interacts with other things that are in the air, specifically these things that are called volatile organic compounds. When we paint or when we cook or when we put shampoo or whatever, anything that smells is a volatile organic compound. And they can interact with ozone to cause basically smog and...
sort of worsen air quality in the room that you're in. And smog's really bad for humans. It kills millions of people a year. Right. So the question is,
how much of this smog is created when you put low wavelength UV in a room and how does any cost from that weigh against the benefit of greatly reducing exposure to disease? It's a smaller problem to be sure than the problem that UV is trying to solve, but it is a significant problem and ideally you would be able to solve one problem without making another one worse.
I got to be honest, you're making it sound really, really bad. The fact that low wavelength UV light could create ozone and smog indoors just seems very not something that I would want in my apartment.
That is very fair. I mean, I think we just don't know. So there's some chemists who think that maybe we're exaggerating how much ozone gets created because we're just modeling. We don't have a lot of direct evidence. Maybe the ozone that gets created gets absorbed into couches and walls and various things in a room. But there's some chemists that I talked to who are very concerned about this. My take is that it is not something that should be put everywhere.
It's something that should be turned on in high-risk situations. It is not something that I would put in every school, in every office, in every home. You know, I think that would be...
Not a great idea, you know. Jose Luis Jimenez did a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggesting that this could add up to tens or hundreds of additional air pollution deaths a year, depending on how widely deployed low-wavelength UV is. He'd be the first to tell you that this is a projection. We have not actually deployed low-wavelength UV in a big enough setting to be able to test how the air quality is affecting people. But we know pretty solidly that...
more particulate pollution is bad for people. We have reason to think that this could cause more particulate pollution. I think the scientists on either side of this are just making different judgments about how that would play out. What really matters are the actual numbers. How do maybe tens or hundreds of additional air pollution deaths weigh against the thousands, if not millions of lives you would be able to save by deploying this broadly?
In a minute, how to go from the world of projections to the world of real experimentation. We're not astronauts. We're oil drillers. We're not even supposed to be here. We're going to an oil rig. Hey, Unexplainable listeners. Sue Bird here. And I'm Megan Rapinoe. Women's sports are reaching new heights these days, and there's so much to talk about and so much to explain. You mean, like, why do female athletes make less money on average than male athletes?
Great question. So, Sue and I are launching a podcast where we're going to deep dive into all things sports, and then some. We're calling it A Touch More. Because women's sports is everything. Pop culture, economics, politics, you name it. And there's no better folks than us to talk about what happens on the court or on the field.
and everywhere else, too. And we're going to share a little bit about our lives together as well. Not just the cool stuff like MetGalas and All-Star Games, but our day-to-day lives as well. You say that like our day-to-day lives aren't glamorous. True. Whether it's breaking down the biggest games or discussing the latest headlines, we'll be bringing a touch more insight into the world of sports and beyond. Follow A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday.
Hi, everyone. This is Kara Swisher, host of On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine and Vox Media. We've had some great guests on the pod this summer, and we are not slowing down. Last month, we had MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on, then two separate expert panels to talk about everything going on in the presidential race, and there's a lot going on, and Ron Klain, President Biden's former chief of staff. And it keeps on getting better. This week, we have the one and only former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. And we have the one and only former Speaker of the House,
After the drama of the last two weeks and President Biden's decision to step out of the race, a lot of people think the speaker has some explaining to do. And I definitely went there with her, although she's a tough nut, as you'll find. The full episode is out now, and you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.
The Walt Disney Company is a sprawling business. It's got movies, studios, theme parks, cable networks, a streaming service. It's a lot. So it can be hard to find just the right person to lead it all. When you have a leader with the singularly creative mind and leadership that Walt Disney had, it like goes away and disappears. I mean, you can expect what will happen. The problem is Disney CEOs have trouble letting go.
After 15 years, Bob Iger finally handed off the reins in 2020. His retirement did not last long. He now has a big black mark on his legacy because after pushing back his retirement over and over again, when he finally did choose a successor, it didn't go well for anybody involved.
And of course, now there's a sort of a bake-off going on. Everybody watching, who could it be? I don't think there's anyone where it's like the obvious no-brainer. That's not the case. I'm Joe Adalian. Vulture and the Vox Media Podcast Network present Land of the Giants, The Disney Dilemma. Follow wherever you listen to hear new episodes every Wednesday. I can't help it. It's so beautiful. So Dylan, we've got lots of potential, lots of unknowns.
How do we start figuring out whether low wavelength UV is actually worth it? So we're at this point making projections based on small laboratory experiments. And I think the biggest thing that we could do to expand our knowledge of what this does and weigh the pros and cons is actually do a large scale pilot of this technology in a controlled environment. One idea I've heard a lot is trying to use something like an oil rig or
An oil rig. So an oil rig is kind of a perfect thing for this. People typically go and work for a month, then they go back to the mainland for a month. They have shifts that are sort of staggered every two weeks. So every two weeks, half the crew leaves, a bunch of people come on, they bring with them new diseases that then circulate on the oil rig. It's an isolated compound. You can easily rig it all with UV lamps to get the effect.
It's small enough that you can be regularly testing the crew to see if they're sick, if they are experiencing air quality issues. You can put air quality monitors in all the rooms to see what's actually happening. You'd be able to answer a lot of questions. Yeah, just thinking about the ethics of this, installing...
you know, low wavelength UV lamps in an oil rig that could potentially have adverse impacts on people in terms of air pollution. Is that an ethical experiment to do? I think it is. I mean, and you want the people involved to consent and there's ways to do it such that the people involved are not going to be at significantly greater risk.
What we're really worried about is prolonged exposure to bad quality air. One month with it is probably not going to give you heart disease. It's a question of are we creating a world where everyone for years is going to be exposed to this thing? Right. We don't know enough at this point for me to want to like put this everywhere.
I don't think we're there in our knowledge of it and our understanding of potential side effects. And so I think that's sort of a necessary step before this becomes a topic of widespread sort of society-wide debate. So given how much we still don't know here, why wouldn't we just use things like filters or ventilation? You know, things that we know work pretty well at reducing disease transmission, but
and, you know, don't create ozone? So ventilation and filtration are good. They're not nearly as effective, just like full stop, at reducing the spread of respiratory diseases. So one way you can sort of compare these is by talking about the number of air changes per hour. A typical sort of ventilation filtration system can maybe change the air in a room about six times an hour.
And low wavelength UV can get like 300 times changing the air per hour. So ventilation is just not going to do anything.
the same level of cleaning to the air on its own that UV is going to. It's also way more expensive. Installing a new HVAC system up to modern standards in an old school that hasn't been retrofitted in many years is a lot more expensive than just like putting some bulbs in some new room. So I think there's a effectiveness advantage for UV and a cost effectiveness advantage. It does more and it's cheaper.
How likely do you think it is that low wavelength UV is actually going to get installed everywhere? I mean, I think if it's actually sort of demonstrated effective and demonstrated that you can deal with whatever air quality problems might come from this, I think there's going to be a large demand for it just from businesses. It costs businesses a lot when people miss work. If they can do something simple,
that, say, reduces absentee rates by 10 percent, you're going to have a pretty good reason to want to install these systems to make sure that people come back to work. Yeah. Hospitals will want to pay for it. Public schools. I think it brings a lot of advantages to parents as well. Just like think of how all the parents of young kids, you know, and how often they're sick with some horrifying new virus that their kid picked up at daycare or something. It's a really like serious issue.
force reducing people's ability to work and participate in society. Right. And I think it looks attractive in countries where TB is still a huge problem. TB still kills millions of people a year. In Nigeria, about 125,000 people die annually from airborne TB. And those kinds of cost-benefit calculations ignore one of the big advantages, which is this is a pandemic control tool. Right. If we had had this in early 2020...
It's not just that you would have saved a lot of people from getting COVID. It's possible COVID wouldn't have taken off, that this would have been a really powerful control tool to keep it from spreading from person to person.
insurance against future things like that is a really big deal. So I'm inclined to sort of estimate the benefits of this is quite high. And the biggest uncertainty is on the cost side, where it could be close to zero. It could be really significant. We just don't know. And it's worth remembering that this isn't a new idea, right? I mean, we had real reason to believe that
diseases could linger in the air and that UV light could be effective against them over 80 years ago when the Wellses did their research. I wonder what this means for other kinds of science that might seem to be outside the consensus at any point in time. I think it's partly a story about the importance of experimentation, that the Wellses kept finding experimental data that suggested that particles can be airborne, that disinfecting the air is important.
It just didn't fit into the theoretical frameworks of a lot of other people. Science works best when instead of ignoring or trying to explain away inconvenient experimental data, you try to integrate it. That seems like what didn't happen in the case of the Wellses. And I guess it might finally be happening. Exactly. If it works onward, if there's major side effects, try to figure out if we can make lamps without those. Try to figure out if some combination with ventilation works.
But if it works, it works. And I think I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that it winds up working. If you want to learn more about low wavelength UV and viruses, check out our YouTube channel at youtube.com/vox.
The Vox video team makes some of my favorite videos on YouTube, and they've got a video that takes this episode a step further. Producer Kim Moss is going to give you a chance to actually see some of the stuff we talked about, from pictures of the Welles' experiments to how some researchers are trying to actually use low wavelength UV right now. That's a UV light behind you?
Yes, it is. Yeah. So this is a far UV light, predominantly putting out 222 nanometer wavelength light, which is shown to be very effective in eradicating everything from viruses to bacteria to mold, allergens and more.
This episode was produced by Manding Nguyen and me, Noam Hassenfeld. We had editing from Jorge Just and Brian Resnick. Music from me, sound design and mixing from Christian Ayala. Fact checking from Melissa Hirsch. Meredith Hodnot manages our team. And Bird Pinkerton headed to Australia in search for allies in the Great Beak War. She was walking along a river when she heard something. The beak beeper had found the platypuses.
If you have thoughts about the show, send us an email. We're at unexplainable at vox.com, and we'd love to hear your thoughts, your criticisms, your suggestions. And if you can, go leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. It really helps us find new listeners. This podcast and all of Vox is free in part because of gifts from our readers and listeners. You can go to vox.com slash give to give today. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back right here next Wednesday morning.
Life is full of complicated questions. I want to know how to tell if my dentist is scamming me. What age is it appropriate or legal to leave your kid at home? From the silly to the serious and even the controversial. Can I say something that will probably just get me canceled? I'm John Cullen Hill.
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