Can special lightbulbs end the next pandemic before it starts?
By Dylan Matthews, Vox
As I write this article, I have a cold.
At some point in the past couple of weeks, I managed to inhale a droplet of water suspended in the air that contained hundreds or thousands of copies of a virus (probably a rhinovirus, the kind that causes most common colds). That virus infected my throat and my sinuses, resulting in the sore throat and stuffed-up nose I have right now.
As inconveniences go, this feels rather minor. I think of my friends with small children, who are constantly careening between RSV and the flu and god knows what other infection their kids picked up in day care and brought back home. I think of my family in assisted living facilities, who sometimes find themselves confined to their rooms, unable to see their friends or interact with the outside world, when there’s a respiratory virus going around. I think of the roughly 1.3 million people a year who die of tuberculosis, a respiratory bacterium that we have yet to defeat. And, of course, I think of the 7 million or so people worldwide killed over the past four years by a respiratory virus spread this exact same way: Covid-19.
At least as long as human beings have lived in large, close groups, respiratory viruses have been present — sometimes an annoyance, sometimes a catastrophe. Though we’ve managed to create vaccines and drugs to blunt their effects, the viruses endure.
But there is a group of people who think we do not need to live this way. These scientists, activists, and entrepreneurs believe we’re going to look back on this era, one of commonly endured airborne infections, as a case of antiquarian barbarism, a bunch of needless suffering that we accepted because we didn’t know any better. They believe that we have the technology now, and will have even better technology soon, that could end respiratory infections for good, the way that disinfecting our drinking water with chlorine helped end typhoid as a major cause of death in the US.
