Credit: wiki commons/Ricardo Liberato

No matter where in the world you find yourself, hospitals are filled with bacteria and viruses and potential infections for patients. Constanza Correa and her colleagues believe they have found a simple, and very old, fix that could greatly reduce inpatients’ chances of infection—replacing bedrails with copper.

Copper definitely wipes out microbes. “Bacteria, yeasts and viruses are rapidly killed on metallic copper surfaces, and the term “contact killing” has been coined for this process,” wrote the authors of an article on copper in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. That knowledge has been around a very long time. The journal article cites an Egyptian medical text, written around 2600-2000 B.C., that cites the use of copper to sterilize chest wounds and drinking water.

Cassandra D. Salgado, MD (who, besides being a hospital epidemiologist and associate professor of medicine, is also the medical director for infection prevention at the Medical University of South Carolina) explains:

…that the antimicrobial effect of copper-alloy surfaces is a result of the metal stealing electrons from the bacteria […]