You can live without food for three weeks and without water for up to three days. However, you cannot live without air for more than three minutes. It's not just the quantity of air that matters - the quality matters too. Unfortunately, the air can be contaminated with harmful germs known as airborne pathogens, such as bacteria and viruses.
Airborne diseases are highly contagious and can cause respiratory illnesses that can be life threatening. It is therefore not surprising that airborne disease outbreaks are becoming a major public health concern, and researchers are working hard to come up with technologies to provide clean air.
So far, however, such technology has had limited success.
Now, a new study shows that non-thermal plasma - a cold gas composed of electrically charged particles, although completely uncharged - can inactivate airborne viruses and produce sterile air. Although this technology has a long and applicable history (in the pharmaceutical and food industries), its use to produce sterile air is an entirely new use.
What a plague
Viruses that can spread through the air include influenza (flu), common cold (rhinovirus), varicella zoster (chicken pox), mumps, and measles. Measles in particular has been labeled a public health time bomb because many parents fail to vaccinate their children. It is important to note, vaccination is the only way to completely prevent measles.
An infected person can transmit the virus through the air with tiny droplets and particles that are secreted when sneezing and coughing. This virus can spread very quickly from person to person through the air, especially in crowded areas such as schools and nursing homes.
The flu is one of the most common and highly contagious airborne viruses. This disease can range from mild to severe respiratory illness and even death; with symptoms including sudden fever, cough, sore throat, runny nose, headache, fatigue, and muscle and joint pain. Hospitalization and death from influenza virus can occur in high-risk groups including children, the elderly, pregnant women, people with weakened immune systems - such as patients with HIV or cancer - and some people with chronic disease.
According to WHO, the flu causes more than 3 million cases of severe illness per year and an estimated 290,000-650,000 deaths. The most deadly influenza virus pandemic was the Spanish flu (H1N1) in 1918-1919 which infected about a quarter of the global population and caused more than 40 million deaths. Newly emerging and airborne viruses such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome are also rapidly spreading from China to many countries around the world.
Treatment for mild airborne viral infections is rest and fluids. However, there are no specific antiviral drugs for the treatment of severe infections. Also, it is very difficult to prevent yourself from becoming infected, although you can reduce your exposure with some good habits such as regular hand washing. If you are infected, you can reduce your risk of passing it on by covering your sneeze and cough with a tissue or hospital mask.
Clean the air
There are air disinfection methods available today, however they have several limitations. Germicidal ultraviolet irradiation (UVGI), for example, is a disinfection method that uses ultraviolet light to kill or deactivate microorganisms by destroying their DNA so that they cannot reproduce in the human body. However, excessive UVGI exposure has adverse health effects, leading to skin erythema (superficial redness of skin) and an eye sore condition known as photokeratitis.
Air filtration is a good method of cleaning air by passing it through a filter that removes particles and stops outside pathogens from getting into buildings such as health facilities. However, some airborne pathogens are too small to be removed because they can pass through the air filter.
The new method developed by researchers at the University of Michigan does offer hope. Their research, published in the Journal of Physics, shows that non-thermal plasma can deactivate 99.9% of airborne viruses by releasing energetic and charged fragments of air molecules that can destroy viruses in less than a second. Non-thermal plasma can also kill bacteria through the destruction of their cell walls.
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