After 114 years? Copper isn’t magic, it has free electrons that stick to bacterial proteins and the like. Any oxidizing agents pick those up quickly, and even things like finger oils are going to use some of them up, and eventually you get a thin coating that doesn’t have them.
Why do you have such a high standard of evidence for the problems with copper, but apparently none at all for its ability to work indefinitely, despite as repeatedly quoted not even meeting clinical reduction thresholds in the first place?
This is not a huge issue in my local hospitals (which are absolutely crawling with heavily armed, steroid infused cops) but… yeah. Absolutely true. That’s one of the reasons to prefer brass (cheaper) and bronze (stronger) even though those alloys aren’t quite as oligodynamic as elemental copper or silver. When I worked for the Academy we used to spray paint copper that was accessible to the public matte black - thus defeating its ability to self disinfect.
Speaking of coatings, if anyone has a brass kwikset POS front door knob (like the vast majority of American homes) you can dismount it and remove the plastic coating with a heat gun, I have done it multiple times. You might burn yourself, and they’ll look dirtier as raw brass, but they’ll actually be cleaner, at least from an anti-microbial/fungal/viral perspective.
Another thing to be aware of is that cheap copper water bottles and brass water jugs sold online may be contaminated with lead or other dangerous metals, and are potentially more dangerous than stainless. Buyers beware. Drinking from copper won’t hurt you, but drinking lead or cadmium contaminated water can.
Friction might be solving that problem. But when I was in that station daily (along with Unca Joe lol) the shoeshine guy used to polish the rail every day. I have no idea if he was paid for this, but he’d buy a can of soda every morning, wipe the rails with a rag wetted with the soda which made them sparkle, and follow up with plain water so they weren’t sticky. It amused me to see him drinking the brass polish
My beliefs are based on my own personal experimentation and observation, which is mostly of brass. I understand that medicine is (and should be!) a praxis and not science, but I’m trying to do science. In my observations, the oligodynamic effect works, and works indefinitely in many settings. If I purposely contaminate a brass surface with organisms removed from a stainless surface, they die. When I expose myself daily to copper, brass and bronze solids, even corroded ones, I don’t get poisoned. However, I’ve observed stainless being problematic in multiple settings - including on my old office door handle, which developed a thriving biofilm on the non-visible under surface after less than ten years, and in hospital bathrooms, and in children’s water bottles.
I use stainless in the kitchen and for weatherproof fasteners. I use brass, bronze and copper for switchplates, handles, register grilles, and ductwork.
Lol you are so right. Sadly I could tell tales… one of my son’s college roommates was briefly hospitalized for malnutrition. My son claims Ralph was eating nothing but candy and poptarts. Anyway, the water bottle incident that triggered my ongoing experiments happened when my youngest was in 3rd grade, during the BPA endocrine disruptor furor. Most of the parents had replaced their kids’ plastic water bottles with stainless in response to that, (and I had never let my children use plastic water bottles) and I was in the school as a volunteer doing end of year cleanout. I found my kids’ water bottles in their lockers, and they’d clearly been refilling and using them, despite having told their mother they didn’t know what had happened to them
Stainless is heavily validated and has been for ages.
Its been the standard for sanitizable surfaces in food, research, and medicine for so long you aren’t going to find many papers specifically about steel but papers will have steel surfaces as the material they are working on. Frankly its just so standardized it’s the control surface. No one is going to do a new paper on such a well understood material. There is just nothing to debate about its effectiveness.
It’s even written into laws and accreditation policies. If you work in the field there are plenty of resources. If you are just trying to search the public internet you probably aren’t going to find much. Knowing how to find information within a field is not necesarily a trivial skill. There is a reason we train for so long in these topics.
I am not sure what your background is but DukeTrout has named some pretty significant organization meetings they attend so I beleive they are a subject expert.
I wish more people understood this basic fact - not just about stuff like this, but all sorts of fields in general… there is so much information out there that really isn’t on the public net, the way that we think at least… And we all train for years to learn how to conduct good research and to be able to vet the information that we’re looking at…
This is my lovely, 100 year old raw brass front door handle. It’s been in use since the building was converted from a factory to a home, and although I added an extra pin when I rekeyed it, it was already difficult to pick since it had a couple of spool pins that appeared to be original.
It isn’t useful for experiments with material removed from public stainless touch surfaces, because it’s outdoors. This equally old doorknob is better for that sort of thing, since it’s indoors and hasn’t been heavily polished.
This is a sandcast, raw bronze heat register. You will notice there is a little blue vitriol on it - this is in a frequently cleaned dining area, and something got spilled on it. If there were carpet crawlers at home, I would be more careful about toxic corrosion, but honestly I’d lick this on live video if I thought that would actually change anyone’s mind about copper safety. It’s not as dangerous as common household cleaners or driving on the highway.
This is a raw brass HVAC duct I built for my bathroom because the lovecraftian geometries of an old converted building caused water to periodically condense and evaporate in this duct. I was concerned by the bioactivity this engendered ( L. pneumophila seems to be undeterred by galvanizing) and this solved that problem. It also got rid of the Tindalos hounds for some reason.
More sandcast bronze - these pieces are all 1/4" thick and uncoated. This thing is absolutely filthy because it’s at the back door into the mudroom and everyone touches it constantly. It’s possible that sometimes enough crud builds up here that pathogens can survive, but when it’s reasonably clean the switchplate is self disinfecting. The plastic switches, sadly, are not. (I didn’t do that lousy plasterwork, I’ll fix it someday.)
I post these images, taken moments ago, not only as an excuse to brag about my happily mutated dwelling (guilty as charged) but as circumstantial evidence that I have spent over a decade personally observing the safety and efficacy of oligodynamic touch surfaces and comparing these to stainless steel surfaces in similar use. I do not claim to have performed these experiments with laboratory rigor nor would I suggest anyone take my statements as evidence - however, I believe this adequately explains why I hold my beliefs. I confirmed the findings I was seeing in research papers and historical sources, and I suggest that others should do so as well before deciding what to believe. For-profit medicine, which espouses stainless, has powerful economic incentives, and a great deal of the research into antiseptic metals is funded by copper producers, which is equally problematic.
So to sum up, we have a couple people familiar with clinical practice telling us that while the oligodynamic effect sounds promising it hasn’t worked out well enough in actual testing as per these references. And then we have someone with a lot of brass doorknobs saying he hasn’t spotted any coronavirus on them yet, so we should all do our own research, the way he did to confirm his biases.
Have we somehow reached the point where this isn’t risible? Because it feels really upsetting. Like, the kind of nonsense that led to the pandemic killing so many.
Frankly, this “do your own research” argument feels an awful lot like the Q-inspired conspiracy theorists, assuming that their “careful study” of Q’s posts are the same thing as people with decades of expertise and research… That’s just not how actual research works, but we’ve had so many years of sustained attacks on expertise (especially those found in universities, in both the humanities and sciences) in this country that people are willing to believe that they are, indeed the same. And we wonder how we got to this point in our history…
No, they are but one of many surfaces of interest in healthcare settings that are currently stainless or plastic that you suggested should be replaced with copper. @Aloisius even kindly posted a photo of a typical patient room with potential copper surfaces circled further up the thread.
Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. That simply doesn’t cut it. Moreover, there would be no way of knowing whether copper or brass caused toxicity in patients past about 40 or 50 years ago just because that kind of traceability of morbidity & mortality simply wasn’t performed prior to that. Brass surfaces would have been replaced with stainless and plastic right around that time, if not before, because that’s when serious infection prevention really started kicking in in the broader hospital setting (beyond operating and procedure rooms), and so it’s difficult to trace any of this.
Which has nothing at all to do with clinical settings, where patients have injuries, burns, ports going into and out of their bodies, and are in a fragile state. Again, you’re attributing to copper or brass something that simply hasn’t been established in the clinical research at all. There are two studies that have examined morbidity and mortality in a clinical setting with untreated copper surfaces compared to untreated stainless and plastic surfaces, which observed a very minor improvement in infection rates and survival. Even these very interesting studies don’t reflect the reality of the hospital environment, where such surfaces are treated with disinfecting solutions that are shown to reduce the microbiological load by many orders of magnitude.
Yes, so many times! (@anon11942186 covered this well) But you’re probably looking for the wrong thing. It’s not the surface that has been tested and validated, it’s the disinfection of the surface that’s been tested. No one cares whether the underlying surface is antibiotic when it’s being soaked with chemicals that reduce bacterial count by 10^5.
Because copper doesn’t last as long as modern materials like PEX for drinking water.
That’s just not even true. Medicine is very much a science. There’s even a term for it: “Evidence-based medicine.” It’s been a thing for the past 50-some years. Physicians can be censured, fined, de-certified, and even jailed for failing to follow evidence-based medicine. Physician and hospital payments are based on it. Drugs and devices are approved for use and removed from the market based on it. And infection prevention protocols are entirely based on it.
Not everyone here is from the US, and not all Medicine is for profit.
And Stainless is also the primary surface in the food industry.
Sorry, but there just isn’t any evidence that the choice of material is based on any powefull economic incentives.
Of course there is always a cost-benefit analyis in any decision but there is no conspiracy here. Trust me, if you have ever sat on a standards panel you would realize how hard it is to get unanimous consensus on anything let alone conspire on something together
Some of my comments that were deleted by the moderators were thanking you for your posts here. The remark you made about validation was helpful to me; and (risking another deletion here by mentioning this) I appreciate your tone and your openness.
I have been involved in standards formation, and I’ve written rules, so I totally get what you are saying!
To quote Dr. Arthur Mencher: "Medicine is a praxis. We practice medicine, which means we will not risk our patient’s health in order to advance our knowledge, or withhold treatment from control groups, for do any number of other things that science might. Medical research is science, and science informs medicine, but medicine is not a science. Science is a heartless tool for learning, and medicine is the humane practice of healing. "
If you pressed him on this, he’d Godwin pretty hard, and probably bring up the Tuskegee Syphilis Study with the comment that it wasn’t even good science, much less medicine.
Interestingly, Wikipedia says medicine is both a science and a practice. If Mencher were alive he’d be writing them a lengthy diatribe, I imagine.
No, PEX is typically rated for 30 years and copper for 50, although not everyone rates them the same. I have installed hundreds of feet of both. There are perfectly intact copper water pipes in my house that have been in use for nearly a hundred years, and I’ve replaced PEX that failed under the sink. It’s a matter of conditions; copper will pinhole if you haven’t got your grounds sorted, for example, and while recent formulations of PEX can withstand chlorine for quite some time, they still can’t withstand rodents, sunlight, or weak crimping. Both materials will biofilm internally despite the copper killing the first few layers of organisms.
Thank you for adding to what @anon11942186 said; you are correct that I was not looking for validation of cleaning regimens. I am advocating for materials that are antibiotic when cleaning regimens are not observed or not performed after every use, because those are the conditions I see in all hospitals. So I was not considering validation in that light, and that did influence my research pattern.
I have worked for over 50 hospitals, BTW. I’m old.
