Because it also breaks down everything else, like plastic, wood, your skin, your DNA, and then you have cancer.
At least according to the article, there seems to be some evidence that shorter wavelength UV can’t penetrate deep enough to cause those issues. It gets absorbed by the outer dead skin layer and liquid layer around your eyes.
From what they’re saying, it sounds like the biggest issue now is that UV light creates ozone and smog, which are obviously toxic. And that doesn’t seem to have an obvious solution, in the article they’re basically discussing how much smog is an acceptable trade off
Because we have skin and eyeballs?
Doesn’t explain why we don’t use them to sanitize rooms while we’re not in them.
What does explain it is that UV also damages stuff too. You use it to sanitize your living room, and soon the fabric on your couches will start losing their color. The paint on your walls will start flaking off. The plastic frames of the frames on the wall will start crumbling away or turning sticky. Nobody wants that in their house.
I have a UV lamp from when I was making sure the room was relatively sterile for our newborn.
So here’s my say:
- The room rapidly stinks of ozone. Ozone is a free radical that fucks up everything, including your lungs. We didn’t enter the room until about half an hour after the UV was off (Ozone recombines pretty quickly).
- UV lamps are frequently used to sterilise hospital rooms because people are usually immunocompromised. Our newborn was fine, but it may have helped.
- COVID turns up in the comments: you cannot emit UV everywhere anytime without, again I quote, fucking people’s lungs up. And COVID was pretty good at spreading anywhere and everywhere, so haha, nope.
- Those fun UV lamps that make stuff glow in the dark? Pretty damn close to visible colour violet, and low intensity (we use them in the dark, no?). This UV lamp for sterilisation? Look at it for a couple of seconds and you are already burning a hole in your retina.
If this also affects other bacteria and germs, wouldn’t that mean people would not build up immunity to anything around them. It’s reasonable for places like airports, hotels, and public spaces and subways but not “everywhere”
Possibly but it also might cause it to go into overdrive. The immune systems ultimate goal is to find things that are not you that are inside of you and remove them. An immune system with no interaction with the outside environment could be vulnerable to very mild infections or it could start to recognize parts of itself as foreign and attack itself, otherwise known as autoimmune disease. It’s a complicated system that we don’t fully understand, although we have a pretty good understanding.
Do you like sand in your eyes?
Because that the feeling you will wake up to after spending a day in a room with UVC lights.