I agree with Jasper and don’t expect impacts on the skin microbiome to be a big deal, but it would, of course, be good to get some more data.
One useful comparison is that healthcare workers use alcohol-based hand sanitizers many times a day, which are quite potent and can kill microbes in areas inaccessible to Far-UVC.
In this review paper, they only saw changes to the composition of the skin microbiome after extremely frequent daily hand disinfection:
“Overall microbe diversity on hands was unchanged with alcohol-based hand rub use or hand washing, with the exception that overall diversity was lower in those that reported >40 hand washing with soap and water events per shift”
From Edmonds-Wilson et al. 2015. I don’t know how bad reduced diversity is and what harmful effects that might have.
While these alcohol-based hand sanitizers are quite effective, they evaporate quickly and accordingly kill microbes in a very short time span. In certain scenarios, you could imagine far-UVC being different because it could kill off skin microbes at the back of your hands more or less continuously during the ~8 hours you are at work. This raises the question if this mode of continuous disinfection has different effects than the short bursts of frequent hand disinfection experienced by healthcare workers. I’d be surprised if the outcome is very different.
I agree with Jasper and don’t expect impacts on the skin microbiome to be a big deal, but it would, of course, be good to get some more data.
One useful comparison is that healthcare workers use alcohol-based hand sanitizers many times a day, which are quite potent and can kill microbes in areas inaccessible to Far-UVC.
In this review paper, they only saw changes to the composition of the skin microbiome after extremely frequent daily hand disinfection:
From Edmonds-Wilson et al. 2015. I don’t know how bad reduced diversity is and what harmful effects that might have.
While these alcohol-based hand sanitizers are quite effective, they evaporate quickly and accordingly kill microbes in a very short time span. In certain scenarios, you could imagine far-UVC being different because it could kill off skin microbes at the back of your hands more or less continuously during the ~8 hours you are at work. This raises the question if this mode of continuous disinfection has different effects than the short bursts of frequent hand disinfection experienced by healthcare workers. I’d be surprised if the outcome is very different.