A new prototype device that can rid hands, feet, or even underarms of bacteria, including the hospital superbug MRSA, has been developed and is in the testing stage, BBC News reported.
The device creates what is called a plasma, which produces a cocktail of chemicals in air that kill bacteria but are harmless to skin. Experts say a related approach could see the use of plasmas to speed the healing of wounds.
These so-called plasmas could help solve gum disease or even body odor, according to the study published in the New Journal of Physics.
Plasmas are a soup of atoms that have had their electrons stripped off by, for example, high voltage. They are known as the fourth state of matter, after solid, liquid, and gas.
These atoms are common elsewhere in the cosmos, where high-energy processes produce them, and they are even posited as a potential source of fusion energy.
Plasma properties have recently been harvested for use in plasma televisions.
However, the new research focuses on so-called cold atmospheric plasmas and rather than turning a whole group of atoms into plasma, a more delicate approach strips the electrons off just a few, scattering them. The collisions with nearby, unchanged atoms then slow down the electrons and charged atoms or ions they leave behind.
These resulting plasmas have been known to be harmful to bacteria, viruses, and fungi – the approach is already used to disinfect surgical tools.
Gregor Morfill of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, who led the research, said what the plasmas do is actually similar to what our own immune system does.
He told BBC News that 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,” he said.
Now the researchers have worked out the precise details of the plasma production that effectively kills off such bugs without doing harm to skin, and demonstrated a number of prototype devices that do the job efficiently.
Morfill said the big breakthrough of last year was discovering how to produce plasmas efficiently at low cost so they could really mass-produce them for hospitals.
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, the team said.
Morfill said that the approach can be used to kill the bacteria that lead to everything from gum disease to body odor.
“The idea is scalable to any size, it can be produced in any shape; it’s very flexible. You can even make it battery-operated so you can use small devices – I have one in my hand right now,” he said.
Researchers using the element argon instead of plain air have demonstrated successful applications directly to wounds, and initial indications are that it speeds healing.
“It remains unclear whether those effects are through the chemical cocktail that the plasma produces, or simply from the effect of reducing the number of bacteria crowding a wound,” said Michael Kong, a bioelectrics engineering researcher at Loughborough University.
Kong told BBC News that either way it is still a very important breakthrough.
“The ideas are not new – but only recently, collectively, has this community of researchers come up with plasma sources that achieve disinfection but also have minimal impact on skin cells.”
However, more testing of the devices is necessary before they end up in widespread use, but Morfill said that there is already significant interest from industry.
Images Courtesy Institute of Physics/New Journal of Physics
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