Radiolab - Invisible Allies

Episode Date: July 31, 2020

As scientists have been scrambling to find new and better ways to treat covid-19, they’ve come across some unexpected allies. Invisible and primordial, these protectors have been with us all along. And they just might help us to better weather this viral storm. To kick things off, we travel through time from a homeless shelter to a military hospital, pondering the pandemic-fighting power of the sun. And then, we dive deep into the periodic table to look at how a simple element might actually be a microbe’s biggest foe. This episode was reported by Simon Adler and Molly Webster, and produced by Annie McEwen, Pat Walters, Simon Adler, and Molly Webster, with production help from Tad Davis. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y.

C. See? Yeah. Hey, I'm Chad. I'm Rob. This is Radio Lab. So last week we did a big episode about the 1918 flu, thinking about this invisible enemy. This week we've got two stories, about a couple of invisible allies. Okay. And we're going to kick things off with producer Simon Adler.

So we're going to start at a homeless shelter in Boston. Hi, this is Jim. Called the Pine Street Inn. Hey, Jim, Simon here from Radio Lab. Oh, Simon, how are you? Thank you for calling. That's an effect. Oh, yeah.

How are you? Does now still work for you? Yeah, no, no, it works. And a very busy doctor there, Dr. Jim O'Connell. Internal Medicine Doc at MGH and the president of the Boston Healthcare for the homeless program. And he says back this past winter as this wave of COVID-19 was making its way towards North America, he and everybody in this community of healthcare providers who work with the homeless were freaked. You know, really good measures for controlling this is to, you know, physically distance and to quarantine,

wash your hands frequently, and to shelter at home. And when you crawl into our perspective of being a homeless person or homeless provider, those things are rendered just absurd. And we're looking at 500 people sitting in what we were thinking of as a powder cake. And so to try to head this thing off, they did all sorts of preparations. They built tents in various places. They scrambled to find extra beds around the city. How many beds do we need?

We were guessing entirely guessing. And every evening, as the homeless folks would return to the shelter for the night, they'd get their temperatures taken and have a brief interview with a shelter worker. Like, just have you experienced any of these symptoms, yada, yada, yada. Exactly. Jim and his team just did what they could and braced for that powder keg to ignite. Yes. However, by mid-March, with thousands of cases appearing all over the United States,

we were not seeing anybody turn positive. No one seems to be getting sick. Huh. Now, this was surprising, but Jim says, We've seen this before. We've seen infection diseases hit the homeless population last. And so we sort of lappingly said none of our folks have traveled to China or Europe. So, you know, maybe this thing's just taking its time.

But... Another dramatic and deadly turn in the coronavirus. The end of March draws near. The most reported coronavirus death. Major cities across the U.S. are in trouble. 80,000 confirmed cases in the U.S. The shelter... Still nothing.

We didn't have anybody positive. It's totally baffling. And it wasn't just them. They call up the Los Angeles homeless shelter. nobody there. San Francisco had not yet seen anyone at the end of March. Basically, nobody in Atlanta. Even in Seattle, they hadn't seen any among the homeless population.

So already they're sort of like, what the hell is going on? We thought we were going to be hit hardest. We aren't being hit. And they're just sort of left in this state of bewilderment until April 2nd, when they get enough tests from the state to do universal testing. We screened and tested everybody. They put 408 people through the test. shove the thing up their nose.

These are sort of the gold standard in tests at the time. They wait a few days. And the results... There were 147 positive tests that night out of the 408. That's about 40%. Whoa. Okay. And of those...

No symptoms whatsoever. Not a single person was symptomatic. Really? It blew our mind. They did more tests at other shelters throughout the city. 30 to 40%. They're all asymptomatic. Exact same results.

That is really, really strange. Again, they look to other shelters across the country. Jim O'Connell calls up his friends doing work in other cities, and many of them are seeing this same phenomenon as well. Weird. Why? Well, oddly, the answer might just be found by looking up. But first, backwards.

a century prior. It's September 1918, the Spanish flu is raging through Boston, killing a massive 40% of those who were hospitalized. And in particular, it's hitting sailors, merchant marines, the hardest. In fact, there were so many of them coming off the boats that they had to erect these temporary tent hospitals, including one they named Camp Brooks. Camp Brooks, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is Richard Hobdei, researcher and author, and he says Camp Brooks, was special. I mean, what they did was they recognized that what they were doing wasn't working.

In effect, they were dying. So they decided, right, we'll change our direction and do something else. So instead of leaving the sailors in these dank tents... At Camp Brooks, whenever they were able to do it. The patients were taken outside in their beds and put outside. Just roll out their beds? Just push the beds out into the courtyard or something? Exactly. At the time, there was indication that putting people outdoors

helped with tuberculosis, and so they thought, why not give it a shot here too? And then at the end of the day, when the sun was gone, they'd put them back in. And by the end of the first night, almost every patient without exception

had a lower temperature at night than during the morning and felt decidedly more comfortable. From the first day, the results were startling. And pretty damn quickly, they'd managed to cut the death rate by two-thirds.

Wow. Really? Yeah. Just by... just by pushing them out into the out into the air? Yeah. That's a stark difference. Do you trust those numbers?

They're from the surgeon general of the Massachusetts State Guard. The medical officer responsible for the sailors' care. Interesting. And he's saying, we don't know why this is working, but it's working. And so bringing this back to the present, tying this all together, as researchers were scratching their heads over this homeless shelter mystery and looking back to these sailors, they started to think, okay, maybe this has something to do with sunlight.

Sunlight. Yes. Thank you very much. Remember at that press conference back in April, when President Trump made those daffy, unfounded statements about UV lights? Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light. And injecting disinfectant.

Injection inside. For which he was berated to no end. It sounds interesting to me. Well, turns out others thought that the sun and sunlight were interesting things to look at as well. To be clear, by all indications they were interested in sunlight, not for any of the reasons that President Trump was, but because sunlight and the sun is how we get the majority of our vitamin D. Whoa, so they're in the sun more. That's the thought? Yes, homeless individuals and the sailors, the idea goes, are less likely to be vitamin D deficient. I've heard people talk about sunlight and vitamin D, but I don't even really know what vitamin D is.

So vitamin D actually isn't a vitamin in the traditional sense, because generally vitamins are things that exist outside of the body that we need to enjoy. to get. That's not actually the case with vitamin D. Our bodies can make the stuff in-house. And the way we do so is sort of cosmically astonishing. Basically, we've got this proto-calesterol molecule in our skin. And that cholesterol is just sort of sitting there doing its thing. But when it gets hit with sunlight, so imagine the tip of your nose as you step out into the sun, in that moment, a little portion of that proto-collesteral molecule on your nose, what's known as a carbon bond gets broken. Now, what exactly a carbon bond is?

I couldn't tell you. It's something molecular. But anyways, with that carbon bond broken, that cholesterol molecule becomes untethered from your nose and can now be absorbed into your bloodstream. Goes through the bloodstream, down, down, down from your nose, into the liver.

Okay. where it picks up hydrogen and oxygen molecules, then back into the bloodstream. Another stop, this time in the kidneys, some more molecular magic. And then finally, it pops out the other side as what we now know as vitamin D. And thinking about this,

what's sort of crazy is like it's as close as we get to being plants. Or it's like the closest connection we have to plants. It's our own little form of photosynthesis that's happening every minute we're out in the sun. Yeah. And crazier still, turns out this little photosynthesized vitamin

is correlating with COVID in a series of strange ways. Hi, this is Frank. Hey, Frank, Simon here from Radio Lab. How's it going? One of which was noticed by this guy, Dr. Frank Lau. Associate Professor of Plastic Surgery at LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. As he was looking at COVID patients in the ICU. The core question is, okay,

seems to be driving the more severe cases. And so some things popped out like, you know, nutrition, obesity, diabetes rates, and so forth. But the one factor that really stood out as being explanatory is vitamin D insufficiency. Folks with mild symptoms had plenty of it. Well, folks in the hospital didn't have much. The ones who were really, really sick. I mean, some of them had undetectable levels of vitamin D. And, well, his paper is pre-published.

It hasn't been peer-reviewed yet because the science is moving very fast. This has been seen in other hospitals throughout the United States as well. So that's the sort of local correlation. And then if we zoom out globally, a team from Northwestern recently compared the severity of cases, the mortality rate between different countries. And what they found was that the best predictor of how poorly a country would fare, how high their mortality rate would be, was its rate of vitamin D deficiency.

Basically, the more vitamin D deficient a country was, the more bad outcomes they were expected to have. And so why would this be? I mean, how would vitamin D help us against coronavirus? So vitamin D helps regulate your immune system, both by turning parts of it up and by turning other parts of it down. Now, when it comes to turning things up,

your macrophages, the sort of warrior cells of your immune system that go out and kill the bad viruses, germs, etc., vitamin D soups them up, and it makes them better fighters. Okay. And, well, this is definitely important. It's actually vitamin D's ability to slow things down that's looking more and more vital. As the body fights COVID-19, overproduction of molecules called cytokines can trigger a cytokine storm. So these cytokine storms, which you may have heard of,

about in the news are essentially your immune system going haywire. Where the immune system attacks the body's own vital organs. One way it was explained to me is that it's like your immune system switching from being a sniper, precisely targeting individual foes, into a machine gunner just brazenly firing all around, leading to way more damage than protection. And here's the thing. Vitamin D reduces the production of these cytokines. Oh, interesting.

Possibly preventing that sniper from becoming a machine gunner in the first place and reducing your likelihood of having one of these cytokine storms. Huh. Has this, where are we in terms of confidence about that this is in fact a thing? Right. We're definitely in the early days here. And as I said, this is still all just correlation. But you are beginning to see some people say that we know enough to act.

that we should start recommending vitamin D supplements, which is controversial in part because those recommendations are often involving race. The NHS is to launch an investigation into why people from ethnic minority backgrounds are more likely to be affected by COVID-19. So leaving the states here for a minute, in the UK, much like in the US,

there are racial disparities in the number of COVID deaths. specifically when it comes to doctors and medical workers. It's the first 10 doctors to die from the disease were from ethnic minorities. 65% of all NHS workers who have died from COVID-19 are from a black Asian or minority ethnic background. Yes, yes. We started noticing this disparity way back in April.

This is Dr. Parag Singh-Hall. He is a British endocrinologist and also the National Secretary of the British Association of physicians of Indian origin. Now, our main aim is to offer Indian origin doctors protection from racism, discrimination, which happens. They've got about 8,000 members, and he says back in April, he started hearing from them. Because at that time, they were, I think, 13 or 14 deaths of health care workers, and all of them were from what you call Bain, which is black Asian minority ethnic population.

BAME or D.A.M.E. or doctorate? of color, I think, as we would call them in the United States? Yes, that's right. And that got us varied. So a lot of theories of proposed, more prevalence of diabetes in AME population, social economic deprivation. And then also this vitamin D idea. I mean, we know the fact that if we are black, it's very difficult to absorb sunlight

and make vitamin D. That's bottom line. and the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in black population is enormous. And so knowledge of that fact, plus then these early correlational studies that were coming out, that started us to understand that maybe vitamin D has something to do with it. Huh. So folks with dark, just so I can pull that apart for a second, folks with darker skin have less vitamin D? Folks with darker skin have a harder time synthesizing vitamin D,

and folks with darker skin. skin are far more likely to be vitamin D deficient. So in the U.S. here, 82% of African Americans are vitamin D deficient, which is about double that of the general population. And, well, in the U.K., those rates aren't identical. They're comparably similar. So the thought is that because vitamin D deficiency correlates well with COVID mortality, and because communities of color have greater levels of vitamin D deficiency. Maybe those two are linked in some way. Yes, that is the thought.

So we started highlighting this. They sent out a message encouraging all of their 8,000 members and their families to take a vitamin D supplement. We started a public awareness campaign through TV and so and so forth. But then, just a couple weeks later... You know, I was part of a focus group discussing COVID and how disproportionate impact it has had. This focus group, Dr. Singh Hall, was part of a group. was made up primarily of doctors and politicians of color.

And during a meeting, Dr. Singh Hall brought up this idea of vitamin D, even offered to pay for vitamin D supplements for communities of color in that region. And the answer from that game politician who was chairing the group, law, these are the exact words, that vitamin D is a distraction. It's all about racism. To which Dr. Singh is like, nobody's saying that that is not at play. of course, access to care, who gets defined as an essential worker, are massive factors here. And I'm not denying that there is a terrible tradition of blaming minorities' biology for the shortcomings of society.

There is what you call systemic racism. We know there are health inequality. There is deprivation. We know that. And I belong to Indian community. I'm from Indian background. And I'm well aware of those systemic issues. No doubt about that.

But nonetheless, that doesn't seem to be the only thing going on here. Particularly when you consider this all started because we were talking about doctors dying. Doctors come from reasonably affluent background. They are not living in poverty. And interestingly, if you look at the data from first week of May onwards. So several weeks after their members started taking vitamin D. There has been, according to my understanding, there has not been any health care worker deaths after that due to COVID.

Now, I'm not saying vitamin D was the only factor. Right, but you think that some of that could be due to vitamin D. Yes, yes. We very much believe so. Yeah. And so he's like, come on, there's a possibility we can save lives here. Like, we can't solve systemic racism overnight. We can solve vitamin D deficiency in a week.

I mean, as medics, our first principle and first philosophy, has to be through no harm. And what we have done is by not pursuing the path of vitamin D, we have caused harm. So back to your question of how confident we should be in all this. Well, we know that vitamin D is good for us. If you ask the top brass here in the United States, the CDC, how effective it is against the coronavirus. We do have to, we have to wait a little bit to be able to get enough data to answer these types of questions. They'll tell you, as Dr. Emily Misaitis of the CDC told me, it's just still too early to say. And while there is undeniably something remarkable happening here in these homeless shelters, again, it's hard to draw a conclusion on what this means. We don't know

if it means that people who are homeless have higher proportions of asymptomatic infection than anybody else to determine that we would need a comparison group. Like universal testing of a comparable population. You know, another group of people living in a congregate setting of a similar age. But since we're still not really doing universal testing anywhere, other than in prisons and nursing homes, we're really only testing people showing symptoms. No such comparison group exists. So it's possible that most of us that are infected are carrying it around in an

symptomatic manner. And just to complicate this one final level further, Dr. Misaitis points out that as far as vitamin D levels in homeless people go, people who are experiencing homelessness are pretty undercounted and understudied. So there's not a ton of information, but the information we do have about nutrients and about vitamin D shows that they're actually more likely to be deficient. Oh, really? Yeah. Yet another thing we don't have enough data on. Well, okay, so what, where do you go from here, or at this point, what's the advice that you give? Because clearly you have a more thorough, robust study coming down the pike here.

But in the meantime, just everybody should be popping their vitamin D supplements and making sure they're not deficient. Yeah, I mean, I think. Once more, Dr. Frank Lau. I wouldn't even say the supplements necessarily. You know, if you get 10 to 15 minutes of sunlight between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., that's when peak UVB rays are present in the sunlight. You can get your daily dose of vitamin D. Also, are you outside right now? Are you outside getting your vitamin D boost? I am, yeah. You can hear the crows.

I can hear you. So right now, so right now we're like getting, we're having like a chemical thing happening. to us because of the sun. Isn't it sort of crazy to think? It is totally crazy. Before I let you go, here, Jed. This is the make or break the episode. As we were finishing this thing out,

producer Annie McKeown and I went on a sort of remote bike ride together. Her in Brooklyn, me here in Wisconsin, really just to take a moment and take in the majesty that is the sun. The thought I've sort of

been having, I do think it's sort of a lovely thought that even well the natural world has decided that it wants to get us with this tiny little virus this microscopic orb billions of miles away there's a giant orb huge

and golden that is in a small way trying to send us a bit of protection is trying to help us that's nice I'm Like that? Okay. Okay.

A car almost just hit a cab. Yes. I'm focusing again. My mother is biking by. Aw. That's nice. Reporter Simon Adler. I'm on the phone here.

And producer Annie McEwen. Hey, mommy says hi. Annie says hi. When we come back, we're going to get elemental. I guess you could say. We're going to look at one more invisible ally that we're just now understanding thanks to this pandemic. Anyhow, that's coming up after the break.

Science Reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simon's Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. Can you hear me now? I can hear you. Yay. Oh, Lord. Lordy, Lordy, Lordy. Look who's 40. I haven't talked to you in like a year.

I know, right. What's... On our agenda. It's funny. Your hands over your face right now. My hands are over my face. Hey, I'm Chad. I'm Mawr. This is Radio Lab. For this next story about a tiny invisible thing that might help us in the fight against COVID,

we have producer Molly Webster. Okay. So this whole story is about an element. And I learned about it recently when I was reading an article from Smithsonian. And it was about this British scientist, this guy. Bill Keevel. Hi, hello. Good morning for you. Hey, how are you? I'm well, thank you. So it called Bill Kevall. He's at Southampton University in the UK. And for him, the story started, which is he's a microbiologist, you know, he studies small things and a ways back in his career, sort of at the beginning of it. He had an experience that basically has come to define his career. Yeah. I worked for

the public health laboratory service at Ports and Down, sort of the equivalent of Fort Dutri. A military lab where they study things like Ebola and smallpox. And while I was there, we started to get outbreaks of Legionnaires disease. Every so often, a new killer disease appears that the immune system can't handle. That's how it is when some 2,000 war veterans come to Philadelphia for the 58th annual convention of the American Legion. Legionaire's disease was discovered like at the end of the 70s. In the past few days, a virus-like mystery illness has killed 15 persons and hospitalized at least 42 others.

The symptoms, much like a heavy cold. So you have coughing, fever, pneumonia, and then you can die. In all, 178 persons are stricken. 29, die. Eventually, scientists figure out it's like an airborne bacteria. Legionella bacteria. and it was traced to their cooling towers. The bacteria was growing in stagnant waters in the air conditioning systems.

But Bill says even though they knew this, even by the late 80s, they hadn't figured out how to stop it. And so they were still having outbreaks. It hits a big hospital in the Midlands. And then it hit the BBC of all places. Really? Yeah, in London. So essentially people are trying to think, like, how can we keep legionnaires from great? growing in how can we keep this legionnaires bacteria from growing in these cooling towers?

That was the problem. Bill was working on some stuff that's like, it was like tangentially related to water and bacteria in water. And so in the middle of this research and discussion, we were approached by the copper industry. Somebody identified as the copper industry. reached out to Bill. Big copper. Big copper.

I literally sent him an email the other day that I was like, could you be more specific about the copper industry? Who is big copper? So the copper industry called Bill. Because at the time they were looking for new markets for copper. And they said, hey, you. We all. industry. No, they said, hey, Bill, what if the tower or parts of the tower were made out of

copper? Wait a second. So how is it that copper, I guess, what is motivating big copper to call Weevil to say, hey, listen, there's this legionaire situation. Okay. We think the copper. My guess is, oh, Keval. I keep calling him Weevil. Oh, I'm such an ass. I'm such an ass. I'm sorry. I think that it's because there is a long history of copper killing bad things. The ancient Greeks and the ancient Roman civilizations, they found that drinking water out of copper-containing vessels inhibited bacterial growth far more so than, I don't know, say something like a wooden cup, for example. This is chemist Joanna Buckley, and she pointed out it wasn't just the ancient Greeks. You know, the Egyptians used copper plumbing. In ancient China, they kept their water in copper.

They weren't sure why, but it stayed fresher for longer. So copper was discovered 11,000 years ago. Whoa. I know, which is a very long time ago. Weren't we just barely starting farms at that point? Yeah, this was like pre-iron age. For a long time, copper was the only metal that was known. So it was used for just about anything where using a metal was required.

Things like armor, weaponry, primitive machinery. I had never even thought about this, but the Bronze Age only happened because bronze is copper and tin. So the Bronze Age is in a sense a copper age that we then left. Really? Yes. And Bill says that for a long time... Copper and particularly its alloy brass were the major material. used in buildings, for example, ships, what have you.

You know, big copper was king. For hundreds of years. And then about 40, 50 years ago, there were all of these new materials that came out of the wars that replaced traditional copper. Stender steel, aluminium, plastics. And people thought, oh, these look nice. And they're easy to clean. So let's get rid of the copper and the alloys,

because we've got to keep cleaning those because they tarnish. And copper is expensive. So it's like suddenly coming out of the wars, you have the invention of a bunch of cheap materials. And then people are like, well, why don't we use these cheap materials in all of our stuff? Wow. So big copper, when they called Keevel,

they were like, Keevel bring back the Bronze Age. It feels like it. That is the copper age. It feels like they're like drawing its straws here. They're like, oh, we heard about something instead. We heard about something in Stafford. Get on it. Can we get copper in there? That's kind of how I played this out in my head. But anyways, Big Copper called Bill and they said, you know, can Copper help with this Legionnaires problem? And so Bill does the experiments and it's like the Legionella bacteria just disappears. Really? Yeah. And after this, you know, very successful collaboration, Big Copper just kept calling Bill. A couple of years after Legionella's, Big Copper calls and says,

There's been this big waterborne outbreak of an E. coli in Walkerton in Canada. Bill takes a little bit of the E. coli, plops it on some copper, and the copper kills it. A few years later, they came back to me and said, look, we really want you to focus on MRSA. The resistant staff infections that pop up in hospitals. People sometimes call them superbugs. Put these superbugs onto a copper surface. It's zapped in minutes. Wait, what is zapping mean?

Oh, sorry. Like what's happening? Kill, destroyed, annihilated, you know? And as Bill explained it to me, in a sense, literally zapped it. Yeah. So copper has a free electron that runs around the outside of the atom. You know, so the way an atom works is there's the nucleus. And then it has the rings of.

of electrons that surround that core. I often think of it as like Neptune. Is it Neptune that has rings or Jupiter that has rings? Well, Saturn has rings. Okay, Saturn. So I often think of it as like Saturn where there's your little core ball and then there's this rings around it. And those rings are all electrons.

And so, yeah. And so copper has kind of what you could call an extra electron. Yeah, and this electron can really move. And if it sees something nice, it transfers to that other. Oh, it'll leave the copper and it'll pop on over to the other thing. Yeah. And so when it gets near a bacteria, the electrons will travel away and bond in a very loose kind of hang out way with some of the atoms. that make up the cell membrane of the bacteria. So like if there's carbon in the cell membrane of the bacteria, if there's oxygen in the cell membrane of the bacteria, the copper will let one of its electrons kind of cozy up to it.

And then that loose bond changes the properties of that cell wall. So you lose this nice, smooth membrane integrity. and everything starts to break down. And what would, like, what would that look like exactly? So imagine a balloon. So when you push it, you know, it moves in, it moves out again. It's very flexible. But imagine part of that balloon suddenly went very stiff.

And if you were to push on that, then it just breaks. Oh, and so it just is brittle and it just breaks. Yes, that's the word. That's the word we're looking for. it's brittle. So it essentially calcifies a little bit of the balloon exterior that then pops it. Yes. And it starts to become porous. So we've got some beautiful pictures of bacteria with holes in them and they're leaking their content outside. You can say they're vomiting. Now, what happens next, which is really neat. Oh, there's more. Okay. Oh, yeah. There's a lot more. So when the copper gets inside the cell,

it reacts with enzymes, just destroys them. And then finally, which is the best thing of all, I think, the copper destroys the DNA and the bacteria, the nucleic acid. People also think it might actually wedge itself into the DNA of the bacteria and prevent replication. So it actually just embeds itself into the DNA. So his whole thing is like, we should be using copper everywhere, people. Yes.

Let's just make the whole hospital. Letta Copper. Thank you for holding. So there is a hospital that I found in South Carolina. Lexington Medical Center in Lexington, South Carolina. That's outside of Columbia, South Carolina. Yeah. In part, managed by this guy.

I'm Mike Greeley. I'm a hospital operations administrator. And they just built a new 10-story patient tower. And we read an article five years ago now, maybe six years ago. All I remember is it said, copper holds some. answers to reducing infections. Basically, one of the things in the article was these DOD studies that looked at copper, not in a lab, but in hospitals. Like, what would happen if you put down copper surfaces or, you know, copper door handles or something? And one of the studies indicated that it

reduced hospital-acquired infections by 58%. And so Mike was like, all right, let's just do this. You would never notice it, but the door paddles that you push to enter the door are copper. They put in like copper platings on the doors, so where you would push the doors open. And then if you have to go to the bathroom, that same door hardware. That's all copper.

And then if you're a family member or a nurse and you want to wash your hands in the patient room, those faucet levers are copper. And there's something else in the bathroom that's copper. It's the toilet flush handle. There's the handle on the IV pole. Which is what the patients do touch when they walk themselves down the hall.

All told, they may. made six different surfaces, copper. Yeah. Mike says, Copper never sleeps. It's always fighting an infection. He believes that it will save lives. Wait, I have two questions for you. Yes. Question one, given the fact that carbon likes to just, carbon?

No, copper likes to just sort of throw around its electrons very loosely. Does it hurt people at all? That's a really great, great question. That was my big question, too. It depends how much you have of it. So copper is actually an element that the body uses at very, very low levels for so many of its metabolic processes. Where it gets toxic, because there is a way in which copper gets toxic, is if you ingest it in water, for example, or in a pill that you've swallowed, for example. If you ingest too much copper, you can hurt your liver and your kidneys and your intestine.

The thought is, though, is that if it's just, on your skin, you have so, so, so, so many skin cells, and your skin cells replenish and turn over so quickly. And there's so many of them that it can't hurt you. Okay. That's question number one. Go ahead. Question two. And question two is, what about COVID? Yeah. Okay, go. Okay. So there was a study where they took COVID-2 and they put it on copper and they put it on cardboard and stainless steel and one other surface. And they saw that by within four hours, COV2 was totally gone from the copper surface. And it took up to 72 hours for it to leave the other surfaces. Wow. That, that's okay. So that's pretty cool. That was done at the National

Institutes of Health and the CDC and a few other places here in the states. Yeah, that sounds, I like those numbers. Frankly, everybody does. This is why you're seeing copper ions infused. Copper stuff everywhere. Introducing copper wear masks. You can get copper masks and copper gloves and copper pajamas. Look how sexy these are.

Put copper into the linen. Copper blankets and copper sheets. Put the copper zap in your nose. This nasal wand that can stick up your nose. It will zap and kill the microbes. Like copper's blowing up right now. Wow. Copper pajamas. I think that's where I would draw the line. I know. The trick here is, and there's a couple of tricks, it's like copper mask, is it super helpful to have a mask with these threads woven through it? The virus would have to sit on there for a long time. Like maybe if you're going to wear the mask all day and then like stick your fingers up your nose or something, maybe then it's practical. The other thing is copper is not cheap. So the price of a ton of copper today, on July 17th is $6,385 per ton.

Okay? For a ton of copper. For a ton of copper. Wow. So then if you're not using copper, you might be using something like steel. Okay. So I'm doing price of a ton of steel. Oh, wait, hold on.

Price. Steel, steel, steel. Price of steel. Okay, so this says stainless steel. Let's just say stainless steel, because I don't. I don't know anything else. There's like shreddable steel is 18 cents a pound. It's $360 for a ton of steel.

Whoa. That's quite a big difference. Well, let me tell you this. So Mike's actually going to go do another 300 rooms in copper. Oh, yes. The rest of the original facility. And the price tag? $600,000 is what it's going to cost me to do 300 rooms.

and a few additional bathrooms and kitchens and things like that. To retrofit. Yeah. And that's a lot for most hospitals. They're not going to spend $600,000 on copper when they really need to replace the CT, or they really need to replace the x-ray unit in the ED. A new CT costs you $460,000. A new MRI costs you a million.

They're not going to spend $600,000 on 300 rooms. Most hospitals are struggling to survive. A third lose, a third break-even. and a third or fortunate to make a small bottom line to reinvest. But Mike says if he can afford it, he's going to do it. So, yeah, I am not above grinding up some copper and walking around. I love that idea. I'm going to get some copper dust and I'm going to dust my children every morning.

It's so, it's like there's so many things here where you're like, how do I do the story without sounding like I'm also funded by the copper industry? This is exactly according to their plan. Yeah. Yeah, they're like, we didn't need to call you, Molly. Because we heard you were on the case, all on your own. You know? Big Copper.

Give us a call. I know. That was producer Molly Webster. This episode was reported by Simon Adler and Molly Webster and produced by Annie McEwen and Pat Walters. Special thanks to. Mike Schmidt and Joe Schwartz. I'd like to say special thanks to Dr. Vadim Bachman and Adrian Gombard.

I'm Chad Abumrad. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time. Hi, this is Nakaya from Port Townsend in Washington State. Radio Lab is created by Jad Abumrod with Robert Krollwich and produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, David Gable, Bessel Hapti, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kielty, Tobin Lowe, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Sarah Kari,

Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Shima Oliai, W. Harry Fortuna, Sarah Sandbox, Todd Davis, and Russell Gregg. Our fact checkers is Michelle Harris.