I was thinking along these same lines but for skin-microbiota… we are lagging behind understanding this compared to gut-microbiota but it seems like the diversity is pretty important to our overall health? Its probably only a risk worth considering for the “install it in all the offices” rather than against using far-UVC in pandemic situations, but I guess research would be needed to assess the risks for skin disorders, or whatever else these microbiota might be important for?
That’s likely an even smaller issue. Far-UV inactivates the transient microbiome on the upper skin surface but not in the pores where the majority of the bacteria live. It’s also strictly line of sight and the skin is pretty wrinkly and only small areas (e.g., back of the hands) are exposed and you constantly re-seed your microbiome from other parts of the body. There’s prelim data from hairless mice which found no changes to the microbiome.
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 was thinking along these same lines but for skin-microbiota… we are lagging behind understanding this compared to gut-microbiota but it seems like the diversity is pretty important to our overall health? Its probably only a risk worth considering for the “install it in all the offices” rather than against using far-UVC in pandemic situations, but I guess research would be needed to assess the risks for skin disorders, or whatever else these microbiota might be important for?
That’s likely an even smaller issue. Far-UV inactivates the transient microbiome on the upper skin surface but not in the pores where the majority of the bacteria live. It’s also strictly line of sight and the skin is pretty wrinkly and only small areas (e.g., back of the hands) are exposed and you constantly re-seed your microbiome from other parts of the body. There’s prelim data from hairless mice which found no changes to the microbiome.
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.