Germ-killing mask a game-changer

As we approach our third year of wearing masks, our two-tier world of the fully vaccinated and the only-a-little vaccinated is easy to overlook as the first 10 US states and then the UK abandon mandatory masking. But with only around 16 percent of our population vaccinated, compared with over 75 percent in the US and the UK, our protection is surely lower.

Yet as our Health ministry has said we must remain masked — even though we are now running at fewer than 100 new Covid infections a day across our population of over 47 million — maybe it would be possible to have a full discussion about the masking we are doing and how well it works.

For after two years, we have learnt some things about transmission, and we have seen more breakthroughs than just vaccinations. As the whole world was put under pressure, the crisis spawn invention, and masking was no exception.

For late last year, I was shown a mask made of a new kind of fabric that actively destroys both viruses and bacteria, and can be washed and rewashed and still works, for around six months.

Now that’s a big deal, for surveys have shown that very few people reach for a fresh disposable mask every four hours or set aside their reusable mask for intensive washing after the same time: yet once worn for longer than that, the mask itself can become a germ hotbed.

For we wear masks as a physical barrier to stop us spraying Covid-laden droplets over others as we speak, cough, or sneeze. But once we are infected, our breath covers the inside of that mask with virus.

We can also put it down on a surface that has germs, or touch it with our hands having touched germs, or end up with germs on the outside of it from others, that we then touch. We can even end up putting germs onto the inside of our own mask and breathing them in for hours.

So a germ-killing mask is great, and this one really is high science, attracting microbes (germs to you and me) with a positive force embedded into the fabric’s own cells that act like a magnet to the negative charge of germs.

That force effectively pulls so hard at the insides of the germ cell that it breaks its wall, and once broken, the contents spill out, no longer a germ cell and no longer able to infect anyone or anything.

It's a technology so groundbreaking that its inventor, the Swiss start-up Livinguard, has been named by the World Economic Forum as a global innovator. But the bit that really has me about these masks is the other ways that the positive-charging technology can be used.

For instance, in an air filter system, so now our air conditioning units can kill all germs in the air. It can be used in water filters too. We already use membranes to capture a lot of germs by filtering them out physically, but, use this, and they stick to it and get killed.

Nor do they clog the fabric up. Once the cell has burst its grip is broken it falls away, now harmless.

And then I saw the founder talking about how a consideration in inventing the technology was all the drug-resistant germs that are developing.

For there’s no ‘drug-resistance’ gets to help germs thrive here, so start imagining what that means in caring for, living with and stopping infections from those with drug-resistant tuberculosis, or any drug-resistant disease.

We can have germ-killing car seats, table cloths, mosquito nets, blankets — and bedding is how most river blindness is transmitted, and many other diseases, too

Now, it’s not as if every home that’s vulnerable to river blindness can now suddenly afford bedding that will prevent its transmission.

But the amazing thing about a technological breakthrough like this is that it doesn’t go away in a year, or 10 years or 30 years, and it opens up transformatory possibilities that stretch ahead into our human future.

And think of the chemicals we won’t need anymore. No disinfectants now, on my germ-killing table, or my future mask.