Carl Zimmer: recommendation

Transcript context

…What’s the rate of return to further investment in ultraviolet lamps now? It could be really quite large. I haven’t seen economic calculations of that, but as I write in Air-Borne, in the book, the idea that you could safeguard the air with ultraviolet light is not new. In fact, William and Mildred Wells were demonstrating it in the 1930s. They actually put ultraviolet lamps up in a couple schools in the Philadelphia area and protected the children there from measles outbreaks. They did all sorts of other experiments to at least show that there was a potential promise there. Ultraviolet lamps could potentially really help in certain places to make it possible to just go about our business and relax because the air around us is being disinfected. There still needs to be more research to figure out how you use these lights to safely protect large volumes of air. You want to make sure that the ultraviolet radiation isn’t in itself creating any harmful compounds in the air that you might breathe, and that might be a problem. But these are all things that could be addressed. Ultraviolet light could definitely be a part of a real, serious approach to keeping indoor air safe. Maybe my worry as an economist is that it ends up being too much like patchwork. You can take any arbitrarily small area and maybe make it safer. I don’t pretend to know the science, but say you could, but unless you have ultraviolet lamps more or less everywhere, you’re just redistributing where people will pick up the disease or the other problem. Isn’t there a property rights issue that makes ultraviolet lamps unlikely to succeed?…

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