Introduction

Passive airborne pathogen reduction

Thank you!

Air is stuff. Unless you’re a dog that likes to put your head out of car windows, this is easy to forget. 

The air around you right now is full of things: nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide and water vapour molecules; bacteria, viruses, fungi and pollen; dust, soot, and aerosols; volatile organic compounds; trace gases like ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide. 

This creates a complex chemical and biological soup that our bodies must filter with every breath. Our noses are full of hairs, our airways are coated in mucus, we have a cough and sneeze reflex to explosively clear our airways, and so many other layers of defense. 

However, dangerous pathogens like the SARS-CoV-2 virus can overcome our body’s defenses. Over 27 million people died due to COVID-19, and respiratory pathogens like influenza, TB, and measles kill 5 million people every year.

Most of society’s biodefenses rely on identifying a biological target (e.g. a specific virus), then creating a specific tool to fight it like a vaccine or drugs. However, we don’t have vaccines or drugs for all pathogens, e.g. we have no vaccine for HIV (600k deaths/year), and we have no vaccine or drugs for lassa fever (5k deaths/year).

If we’re in a world where AIs can aid the development of 10s of airborne transmissible and highly fatal pathogens, and they’re released by bad actors at the same time, what do we do?


We need biodefenses that are **pathogen-agnostic** and provide **ongoing passive protection**. 

Pathogen-agnostic is important because a bad actor could deploy multiple viruses that are designed to bypass our pathogen-specific defenses. E.g. if we stockpile influenza vaccines assuming the next pandemic will be due to H5N1, then a bad actor could instead deploy an enhanced coronavirus. 

Far-UVC works by bombarding the air with ultraviolet light (200-230nm). This light penetrates and destroys the protein structures in viruses and bacteria. They can’t mutate to avoid it, because it physically breaks their molecular bonds. UV light has been used to disinfect water in a similar fashion for over a century. While lower-energy UV wavelengths cause skin cancer in humans, 200-230nm light is absorbed by the proteins in the upper layers of our skin so it doesn’t cause any damage to our DNA.

Ongoing passive protection is important because changing the public’s beliefs and behaviours is extremely challenging. For example, 10% of the UK public refused to comply with mask-wearing recommendations during COVID-19, and [>300,000](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071284/this-is-how-many-lives-could-have-been-saved-with-covid-vaccinations-in-each-sta) US adults died during COVID-19 due to vaccine hesitancy. 

Far-UVC is infrastructure. It’s just _there_, every hour of every day, disinfecting the air we breathe and the surfaces we touch. Once installed in a space, it doesn’t need any individual behaviour changes. However, it’s still likely to get pushback (see conspiracy theories about 5G telephone towers).

This pathogen-agnostic, passive protection could lower the reproduction number (R0) of any new pathogen below 1, or low enough that containment measures like contact tracing and quarantines have time to prevent ongoing spread.


UV Air Disinfection

Passive airborne pathogen reduction