Birmingham’s Selly Oak Hospital is launching an 18-month clinical trial to establish whether copper surfaces can combat MRSA and other hospitalacquired infections.
Selly Oak was selected for the trial as it is a multi-specialist centre with an advanced microbiology centre. Stainless steel door handles, push plates, bathroom taps, toilet flush handles, grab rails and even pens will be replaced by high copper brass. To control the experiment, a similar ward at the hospital will continue to use stainless steel.
Test results have showed that Staphylococci (the MRSA bacteria) remained on stainless steel for “days” while bacteria on pure copper were killed within 30 minutes. Bacteria placed on brass – an alloy of copper and zinc – died within five hours.
Professor Tom Elliott, deputy medical director at the University Hospital NHS Trust, said: “Potentially it is very, very exciting if we find that copper actually works in a clinical environment.”
Director of the Environmental Healthcare Unit at Southampton University, Professor Bill Keevil, explained how copper defeats virus bacteria: “The metal reacts with the bacteria and inhibits their respiration – in effect it stops them breathing. In fact if you look back in the literature, the Egyptians were using copper thousands of years ago to treat infections.”
He added that copper could also be used as a possible defence against bird flu: “Avian flu is almost identical to human flu, so, although we haven’t done the work yet, we would predict the same results.”
