Hospitals are horrible places to be. No matter what you are
in there for; visiting a relative, working, or there for yourself, hospitals
are not a place you want to hang out. Even making a trip to the emergency room,
one is often persuaded to wear a mask whilst sitting there. Who wants to catch
that icky stuff floating around? And heaven forbid if the person three seats
down from you sneezes? Yuck! And then there’s the real fun stuff. Say you go in
for surgery; regular surgery because you broke your leg or something along
those lines. You’re going to have to use those bathrooms, touch those door
handles, inhale those germs. Now image all the serious infections fluttering
about. You may be in there for a broken leg, while the person one room over has
MRSA or some horrid stomach disease. You may think the wall protects you, but
who knows who was in there before you? You can only hold your breath for so
long; not like that would particularly help considering most of these awful
infections are contracted through contact.
Over 100,000 people die yearly from contraction of an
infection that they didn’t have when they went in. Hospital staff fight it the
best they can with sanitization and hand washing, but can only do so much.
However, according to the Copper Development Association’s Antimicrobial Copper
Website, copper seems to be the solution. It seems as though bacteria doesn’t
like it. Supposedly, copper can continuously kill 99.9% of bacteria within two
hours of contact. They are proposing that door handles, plumbing, and as much
as they possibly can be made of copper. When researchers took culture from the
copper surfaces, the amount of microbes had “dropped well below what is
considered to be a risk.” The copper did this on it’s own without anything
added except for standard cleaning. So how does this wonderful new discovery
work? Copper’s killing power is nothing more than the fact that metal is a
conductor of electricity. The microbes are literally being short-circuited.
Copper is easily recyclable and is never thrown away. Our hospitals may have a
new look to them sometime in the future.
Article: http://health.howstuffworks.com/medicine/healthcare/copper-kills-microbes-and-bacteria-could-save-lives.htm
Image: http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2013/05/14/copper-in-hospital-rooms-may-stop-infections/
