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ATLANTA -- Adding a common ingredient
in shampoo to paints and varnishes can create self-sanitizing coatings
for frequently touched surfaces in public buildings that continue killing
germs for months, according to research conducted by a multi-state consortium
of high school students and retirees.
Working through a website, 10 students from New York,
Texas and Virginia joined three World War II veterans and a retired railroader
from Virginia to report their research findings at the 105th General Meeting
of the American Society for Microbiology.
"Public buildings and especially schools are at the center of the
epidemiological web for spreading common upper respiratory diseases that
cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars annually in lost productivity.
While it has long been known that our coinage possesses the quality of
being self-sterilizing, little previous thought has been given to making
frequently handled surfaces such as railings, doorknobs, push-plates,
desktops, and faucet handles in public buildings similarly self-sterilizing
through the addition of rapidly effective agents," says Carl Vermeulen,
a retired microbiologist who runs the website and is coordinator of the
project.
In order to find additives that could create the most effective self-sterilizing
surfaces, the students tested a variety of metal dusts, salts and other
organic chemicals by mixing them into clear varnish. Once dried, varnished
surfaces were tested for the speed in which they killed the microbes applied
to them. The coating doped with cetavlon, a major detergent component
of many shampoos that is completely safe for humans, killed the microbes
within seconds of application. Even after 5 months the coating could still
self-sterilize within 30 seconds.
"We found that the common shampoo ingredient cetavlon was especially
effective, as well as having good dopant properties due to its being a
detergent that mixes well with both aqueous and oil-based coatings,"
says Vermuelen.
While they have shown that paints and varnishes can
be made rapidly and inexpensively self-sterilizing, the group has yet
to develop floor and furniture polishes that work.
Source: American Society
for Microbiology
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