Copper as an Antimicrobial – Getting Started (Part 1 of 3)
By Harold Michels, Copper Development Association Senior Vice President of Technology and Technical Services
On Feb. 29, 2008, the EPA registered 275 copper alloys with public health claims. Subsequently, that number has grown to 282. Under EPA guidelines, a public health claim relates to the control of organisms that pose a threat to human health. Dr. Harold Michels, PhD, senior vice president of technology and technical services for the Copper Development Association (CDA) was instrumental in making this happen. An engineer, Dr. Michels also has a PhD in materials science. He joined the CDA 10 years ago.
The fundamental properties of copper, which I reviewed when I arrived at the CDA 10 years ago, included electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, the color of the material and its physical and mechanical properties. Then I came across another somewhat obscure property of copper. Its inherently antimicrobial response.
We’re trying to get decision-makers, including hospital administrators, infectious disease professionals and architects to recognize that copper can help in the fight against the bacteria that cause infections. People just don’t know about this. What’s really amazing is that ancient societies recognized that copper was antimicrobial before there was a germ theory. But the idea to study this came from a student nurse’s project that was published in a newsletter in 1983. They looked at brass and stainless steel doorknobs in a hospital and found little bacteria on the brass and lots of bacteria on the stainless steel. And then they actually put bacteria on the brass and stainless steel and observed the same thing.
So I repeated this work in the laboratory and under controlled circumstances so we could know exactly what would happen. This was in 2002. So we tested 24 copper alloys and they were all effective in killing the selected bacteria, E.coli 0157:H7. That was the beginning of this project.
