Numlock Sunday: Shayla Love on copper's antimicrobial properties

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Shayla Love who wrote “Copper Destroys Viruses and Bacteria. Why Isn’t It Everywhere?” for Vice. Here's what I wrote about it:

The U.S. healthcare system may be sleeping on the advantages of using copper plating in its equipment, with clinical trials demonstrating that copper is really effective at killing bacteria and better at destroying viruses than the stainless steel and plastic that dominate surface materials. This isn’t exactly a new discovery — people in trades that entailed copper often skirted the worst when plagues rolled through back in the day — but a 2012 trial in three hospitals show this may be an idea whose time has come. Enveloping high contact area — bed rails, buttons, tray tables — and equipment in copper reduced microbes by 83 …