Narrow-Spectrum UV Light May Reduce Surgical Infections

Dr. David J. Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University Medical Center, explains the significance of a single-wavelength UV light which can kill bacteria but remain safe for humans.

Transcript

00:00:00 so what we're looking at here is a particular type of uh ultraviolet light um that's generated by a particular type of ultraviolet lamp and the ultraviolet lamp is called an eczema lamp and this eczema lamp produces ultraviolet radiation of one particular wavelength and that's uh about 207 nanom what's special about this particular wavelength is that uh while it kills bacteria very

00:00:31 efficiently uh it is very very strongly absorbed in biological materials so it can't penetrate through the very surface layers of our skin the dead cells that on the surface layer of our skin can't penetrate even through a single human cell so it's pretty safe or we believe it's entirely safe for uh human exposure and yet it is uh lethal for uh bacteria like

00:00:57 MRSA and the particular uh thing that makes us very excited is that it kills drug resistant bacteria like MRSA just as well as it kills uh drug uh sensitive bacteria and as as you know the problem that we have with uh with surgical sight infections is drug resistant bacteria uh bacteria that don't get killed by conventional antibiotics so we see this system uh as

00:01:28 having a great deal of potential in the oper ating room the idea being that it would be sha on the the light would be Shone onto the uh wound during the surgery so that any bacteria that settle on the wound would immediately be killed on the other hand it would remain safe for both the uh the patient and also for the surgical staff because it doesn't damage human cells