Process
Copper-silver ionization is a dispersive process that introduces long-lived, stable, positively charged copper and silver ions into the water system. The ions bond electrostatically with negative sites on bacterial cell walls and denature proteins. Over the long term, ionization thus disperses and destroys biofilms and slimes that can harbor Legionella, the bacteria responsible for legionellosis (Legionnaires' disease). Complete control of a water system can take 30 to 45 days. Flow cells should be cleaned periodically to maintain the system; in a hospital, this task can be delegated to the facility's utility engineers.
Forensic scientist Randy Fornshell of the Sedgwick County Regional Forensic Science Center explains that copper-silver ionization is a modern implementation of the ancient Greek practice of reducing bacteria in wine vessels by lining them with silver, and controlling algae and fungi with copper. Fornshell notes that copper-silver ionization has been effective in swimming pools (it is an alternative to chlorine) and is becoming adopted by larger municipalities.
Replacing chlorination with copper-silver ionization to keep water safe was one response of Frederick Memorial Hospital, Frederick, Maryland, to new requirements in the 2001 Guidelines for Design and Construction of Hospital and Healthcare Facilities, issued by the American Institute of Architects. Ionization is in many cases installed because more convenient and cost-effective than other approaches.
Read more about this topic: Copper-silver Ionization
Famous quotes containing the word process:
“It is part of the nature of consciousness, of how the mental apparatus works, that free reason is only a very occasional function of people’s “thinking” and that much of the process is made of reactions as standardized as those of the keys on a typewriter.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Consumer wants can have bizarre, frivolous, or even immoral origins, and an admirable case can still be made for a society that seeks to satisfy them. But the case cannot stand if it is the process of satisfying wants that creates the wants.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner’s visit to Congress—these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)