Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2020 22:20:09 -0400
From: “John Dykers M.D.”
Subject: Sunshine and COVID19 -RickJoy’s post
Thank you for your link; I checked it. The weatherman explained about the atmosphere filtering out 95% of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. If it did not, we would all be toast!
Rick is certainly correct that lying out in the sun, taking a sunbath, will not kill corona virus inside our body. But the same ultraviolet light that gives you a sunburn, if you sunbathe too long, will kill most bacteria and viruses, even the tough tuberculosis germ.
UV rays have been used to sterilize delicate medical devices (that could not withstand an autoclave) for decades. I checked with Siri and her first link was to a UV device maker, Dan Arnold, works for UV Light Technology, who was denigrating the ultra violet radiation from the sun as not being of a wavelength to kill a virus so he used his machine to make a “stronger” UV 2 or 3 that would sterilize instruments and was too strong for human skin. How long in how strong a sun is certainly important as the detail in the BBC link explains. So Rick is correct about another important point; be careful of your sources and your interpretation of what you find. The devil is in the details, and again Rick is correct that we don’t rely on sunshine to keep us safe from COVID19 but it helps.
Avoiding the machine’s UV wavelength would certainly be true for not using such in tanning booths -they are not a good idea anyway because of the risk of DNA cell damage that causes melanoma and squamous cell and basal cell skin cancers, just as sunburn damage does. This same sunshine will damage a corona virus exposed to it and render it incapable of entering our human body, but unknown how long and how much. Still wash your hands. Viruses are complex conglomerations of DNA, and if that DNA enters a cell, even the cells of the bat this COVID19 seems to have used to pass into the human population originally, it may raise havoc. COVID19 won’t survive long on cardboard anyway, so we don’t get sick from the mail; not more than 2-3 days on a steel or copper surface; longest on plastic, maybe 3-4 days, and this is expressed in a range because the studies show a dramatic fall off in numbers of spots that still had findable virus until the number becomes so small as to be insignificant mathematically. The Rous Sarcoma in chickens is caused by a papilloma virus. Cervical and throat cancers in humans are caused by the human papilloma virus (HPV) we now have a vaccine to prevent. I hope we will have an effective vaccine for COVID19 soon.
I apologize for not giving you a “Link”; I read about this sort of thing so much I don’t keep references unless I am writing a journal paper. see dykers.com
John Dykers