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Comments: 237 +- Science: Plasma Device Kills Bacteria On Skin In Seconds on Friday November 27, @01:39PM
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by
kdawson
on Friday November 27, @01:39PM
from the it's-a-dry-cold dept.
from the it's-a-dry-cold dept.
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medicine
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science
Ponca City, We love you writes "In medicine, plasma, the fourth state of matter, is already used for sterilizing surgical instruments; plasma works at the atomic level and is able to reach all surfaces, even the interior of hollow needle ends. Now the BBC reports that researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have demonstrated a plasma device that can rid hands, feet, or even underarms of bacteria, including the hospital superbug MRSA, by creating cold atmospheric plasma that produces a cocktail of chemicals that kills bacteria but is harmless to skin. 'The plasma produces a series of over 200 chemical reactions that involve the oxygen and nitrogen in air plus water vapor — there is a whole concoction of chemical species that can be lethal to bacteria,' says Gregor Morfill. 'It's actually similar to what our own immune system does.' The team says that an exposure to the plasma of only about 12 seconds reduces the incidence of bacteria, viruses, and fungi on hands by a factor of a million — a number that stands in sharp contrast to the several minutes hospital staff can take to wash using traditional soap and water. Morfill says that the approach can be used to kill the bacteria that lead to everything from gum disease to body odor and that the prototype is scalable to any size and can be produced in any shape."
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Excessive cleanliness (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you remember the article on /. about how excessive cleanliness isn't all that good for you? Yeah...
Re:Excessive cleanliness (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Excessive cleanliness (Score:5, Funny)
I dated a girl in high school that had excessive godliness
Considering you are posting on Slashdot...was her surname .png?
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Re:Excessive cleanliness (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't know about you kid, but a doc sticking his hand into my insides is one of those situations where I'm willing to forego the 'benefit' of having my immune system stimulated by germs being introduced in the process and ask him to wash up.
Parent
Re:Excessive cleanliness (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you remember that not everything applies to every situation? Because it doesn't.
The article about excessive cleanliness was relating to raising children. Basically, our immune systems are like most things in us in that they need to be used to develop. As such children need to get sick to have a well functioning immune system as adults. You don't want to keep them in a sterile environment or they'll never develop defenses.
However this is for hospitals. There you do want things as clean as possible. You have people who are in weakened states, their ability to fight off disease is less than normal. Also, you are bypassing a lot of their defenses in many cases. Your body is much more difficult to infect via the nose and mouth than directly via an open incision in your chest. As such, maximal clean is desirable.
This is not an all or nothing thing. Being super clean is not always good or always bad, it depends on the situation. You wouldn't want to buy this for home and turn your house in to a sterile cleanroom from which you never let your kid out. They'd have no immune system and be very vulnerable in the world. However you do want this for hospitals to ensure that wounded and sick people aren't made further sick by an infection that they can't fight in a weakened state.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
These are not being suggested for in-home or preschool whole body sanitizing. They're suggested for doctors or nurses working on people with infectious diseases and potentially compromised immune systems. The problem of excessive clenliness isn't caused by washing up, it's caused by obsessively slathering your child in sanitizing gel whenever he might have (god forbid) touched something.
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Resistance? (Score:3, Insightful)
So how long until we see bacteria resistant to this device?
Re:Resistance? (Score:5, Insightful)
Never. There is a difference between removing the easy bugs, and complete annihilation of all bacteria it come into contact with. Its like saying the if we had enough super novas humans would become resistant to them.
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Resistance is Useless (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A more apt analogy would be to say that out of all the intelligent species in the universe, there is bound to be some that know how to evade or cope with a supernovae.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It will denature any protein at all. It doesn't harm the surface of your skin only because that is already composed of dead cells. Bacteria are about as likely to evolve resistance to fire or concentrated nitric acid.
Re:Resistance? (Score:5, Informative)
In order to grow resistance, you have to leave a few alive and they have to have been left alive due in some part to something in their makeup causing them to be less vulnerable to the 'weapon'.
In other words, something that lived only because it was never touched isn't going to evolve into the superbug.
This eradicates the germs, they aren't being poisoned or having their chemical processes blocked (which is what most antibiotics do), it's ripping the germs apart at the atomic level. You don't develop a resistance to that.
Parent
Re:Resistance? (Score:4, Informative)
Your first sentence is true, the second is false. Position _can_ be a genetic advantage. "Something that lived only because it was never touched" happens all the time in biology, where the positional behaviour can be driven by genetics.
Birds avoid high altitude, herds don't generally jump off cliffs, etc. The same happens on a more primitive level, too. People think about genetics and think it's like a human arms race or something, but all natural selection needs is surviving members of a species and it will encode _whatever_ information made them survive. Please remember, we're not talking about single instances of plasma sterilization processes, but basically waiting for a mutation to come along that happens to encode the information which in turn makes a significant contribution to the survival of the bacteria. It might not happen often, but if it happens a few times, then that strain will spread.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So how long until we see bacteria resistant to this device?
About 20 years after we see bacteria resistant to current gamma ray and UV sterilization techniques. Don't hold your breath. Sterilize means no bacteria or spores survive. Do you think they chose 12 seconds "at random" or because "it sounds cool"? No, 12 seconds is the time (with a probably safety margin built in) at which cultures have shown repeatedly that all bacteria are dead.
sweet (Score:3, Funny)
Re:sweet (Score:4, Insightful)
A plasma bathtub would be good but what *I* really want is a plasma TOOTHBRUSH...
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Re:sweet (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Kick-ass for hospitals (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Wouldn't you still need to wash hands to remove the larger bit of stuff stuck to your hands? Bacteria is the primary reason why you need to wash your hands all the time, but not the only one.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Removing bulk material is comparatively easy, when needed. Washing to decontaminate, as is required frequently in hospitals, is a much more arduous task.
as a nurse, you should know better (Score:2)
As a nurse I would welcome this as I have to wash and disinfect my hands several times a day.
As a nurse, I'd hope you would remember the same lecture on hand-washing I got when I started working for a hospital. Namely, that your nails are equally if not more important. What does this do for dirt under nails? Uh huh.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Gets rid of body odor? (Score:2)
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They're expensive; don't give them away. Just holster one on your belt and blast any smelly coworkers with your plasma gun.
Good bacteria? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good bacteria? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Good bacteria? (Score:4, Informative)
The same thing that happens to them when you wash with antibacterial soap.
One of the most overrated products in the world. Everyone thinks they're getting "anti-bacterial" protection.
If you want "clean hands" while washing with antibacterial soap, make sure you do like we surgeons and wash each hand for 15 minutes. Even then you'll have critters living in your sweat glands... but your bacterial count will be very very low. For the regular "less time than it takes to sing the the birthday song" hand washing, anti-bacterial soap offers virtually no advantage over regular soap.
Now hands up who spends 30 mins washing their hands every time they touch something.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
being able to fairly safely eat a sandwich with your hands?
You have your own blend of bacteria, and shouldn't have trouble with a sandwich even if you haven't washed your hands. After all, those Peyer's patches [wikipedia.org] should count for something in identifying and producing antibodies for your home blend of bacteria.
The trouble is when a) someone prepares your sandwich without washing their hands, thus inoculating you with strange bacteria and b) when you touch other peop
Re:Good bacteria? (Score:4, Insightful)
Its about time we have a decent solution instead of 15 mins of washing, where are the scientists on this one, 15 mins * few times a day * 1000000 surgens at their salary levels = billions of dollars wasted time.
There's a problem with your accounting: you're forgetting to offset this by the cost of millions of infected patients staying longer at the hospital, the antibiotics used, and the inevitable fatalities.
The standard infection rate for most wounds is around 10% in nature. Aseptic procedure (hand washing, sterile equipment, etc) has brought this down to under 1%. So tack on a week or so in the hospital (plus the fatalities) for 9% of all surgeries performed in the world, then compare it to hand washing.
Not to mention the ethical side. We wash our hands because it's part of our "do no harm" credo.
Parent
Mechanism (Score:2)
Whereas an autoclave, which sterilizes using heat, only works on the proton, quark, and meringue pie levels?
Babylon 5 showed something like ths (Score:3, Interesting)
Funny how you can often find references in fiction to things that later become reality...
Of course... (Score:2)
The big question is, how soon can we turn this into some sort of weapon?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The big question is, how soon can we turn this into some sort of weapon?
The device does look like an oven...
You know who else loved ovens?
I'll bite (Score:4, Funny)
Rachael Ray [freakingnews.com]?
Parent
a true "wtf" (Score:2, Interesting)
this belongs on the science equivalent of www.thedailywtf.com
plasma = uncontrolled mix of highly reactive chemicals
highly reactive chemicals = damage to skin at some level
thus we have that old item, the therapeutic index roughy ratio of harm to good
however,
highly reactive chemcials = bugs getting resistant
how ? learning to live deeper in the skin (bad for you)
learning to make enzymes that deto the highly reactive chemicals (radical quenchers like SOD)
learning to elaborte low molecular weight or high molecu
Is harmless to skin? (Score:2)
So was phenol, for that matter. If it kills bacteria in 12 seconds, it's "not nice stuff". Oh yeah maybe the keratin on your skin will prevent it from penetrating. What if it gets in your sweat glands. What if your skin has a lesion, and the keratin is interrupted...
This one gets filed in the "call me when we've been using it safely for 20 years" category. Until then I will stick to soap and water.
What? (Score:2)
Plasma Device Kills ... Skin In Seconds
Sorry, but I always read it as this. And TFS is just a big bunch of white noise after this...
Re: (Score:2)
If it's germ free and not large enough to be visible, does it matter?
Re:Surface only, though? (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's germ free and not large enough to be visible, does it matter?
It does if you're a surgeon. There's something called the foreign body response [wikipedia.org], and we've seen it happen even with particles of the STERILE talc they line some surgical gloves with to make them easier to put on. Problems aren't only caused by bacteria. Depending on the person's immune response, virtually anything can cause a life-threatening reaction to normally "inert" things like nylon suture or titanium rods/sutures. Things like dirt and human hair are more likely to provoke a reaction.
Parent
Re:Okay, I know this is off-topic... (Score:5, Funny)
That's just coincidental. Besides there were FIVE elements; Fire, water, earth, air and orange haired Ukrainian chick.
Parent
Re:Okay, I know this is off-topic... (Score:5, Informative)
That's just coincidental. Besides there were FIVE elements; Fire, water, earth, air and orange haired Ukrainian chick.
Everyone knows that the fifth element is Heart and is represented by a South American with a monkey. Source [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Okay, I know this is off-topic... (Score:5, Funny)
Ninety seconds? Look at who thinks he's a bigshot, Mr. "I'm not a minute-man anymore". Now to click "post anonymously" to protect myself from embarrassment.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Um, guys? The Fifth Element was LOVE? HELLOOOOOO?
What, and you don't consider "Milla Jovovich" and "love" to be interchangeable?
Re: (Score:2)
They do actually correspond pretty well, but that is only when you ignore the states of matter that occur at very low temperatures (superfluids, superconductors, Bose-Einstein condensates) and at very high temperatures (quark-gluon plasma).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And four compass directions: North, South, East, and West. The bible mentions the four corners of the (flat, square) Earth too. All these references to four! Before you know it, your post will get modded to Score: 4, Interesting.