The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention approves

Oct 24, 2014 13:17 GMT  ·  By

Ultraviolet light and radiation is used for more things than you probably think, but germ slaying is probably among the better known ones. As it happens, there is a whole line of robots that specialize in this.

Xenex isn't the first company to make robots, and it's not the first to make robots with some ability to use ultraviolet light either.

However, it does have the ear of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or US CDC for short, and the opposite is true as well.

Long story short, Xenex has created a series of robots that are especially adept at emitting UV light. So adept that they can zap germs.

The response to the Ebola panic

You might be aware of the whole Ebola craze going on right now, where apparently the disease has begun to escape Africa.

We'll just make abstraction of how one or several Ebola-infected people have probably been flying by plane out of the continent every month. And of how the whole panic would probably have been avoided if the press didn't go all frantic about that New York City doctor confirmed to have it.

Ariana Grande canceling her concert in Spain because she feared she'd get Ebola didn't really help the world's morale either.

Now, though, the ironic, capitalistic silver lining is showing itself: corporate money made off Ebola-zapping robots.

Xenex has released a line of robots which use Full Spectrum ultraviolet radiation to disinfect areas and protective clothing before workers remove them. This should greatly reduce the chance of infection.

The robots comply with the protocols  set in place by the aforementioned US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They can also decontaminate hospital rooms.

How the Xenex UV robot works

It takes between five and ten minutes to fully decontaminate an area. The UV lamp pulses in the UV C band covering 200 to 280 nm twice a second, penetrating a microbe's cell walls and fusing the DNA, rendering the pathogen incapable of reproduction.

In addition to Ebola, this can slay various other bacteria, viruses, fungi, spores and molds, like Enterovirus D68, VRE, Clostridium difficile (C.diff), and Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

The horrors or Ebola

Dramatics aside, the virus can get really nasty if left unchecked. The symptoms start with fever, sore throat, muscle pain and headaches, then they get worse, crossing into rashes, diarrhea and vomiting, then liver and kidney failure, after which internal and external bleeding and the resulting low blood pressure ultimately cause death.

It takes six to sixteen days for a person to suffer through the whole process. All in all, it's pretty scary, and outbreak control is understandably thorough. Hopefully the latest mini-crisis doesn't spiral into something worse.