Does airing out mattresses outside do any good?

Airing out rugs and mattresses outdoors is a great way to disinfect them, thanks to a little thing called ultraviolet light. Find out how UV light can disinfect everything from rugs to water in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:27):
him Marshall Brain with today's question, Does it do any good?
Air out rugs and mattresses outside? There's at least one
big advantage that the air outside the house has over
the air inside the house. On a sunny day, the
air outside the house comes with a good dose of
ultra violet radiation from the sun. While ultra violet rays

(00:50):
are not great for your skin, it turns out that
they are very good disinfectants. They kill bacteria. So if
you haul a rug to a sunny spot on the
driveways so that it gets several hours of strong sunlight,
you're using the sun to disinfect it with something big,
like a mattress or an area rug. It's one of
the few inexpensive ways to kill bacteria. You can't exactly

(01:14):
throw a mattress in the washer. It turns out that
ultra violet light. It's used as a disinfectant in a
number of different products. For example, you can buy swimming
pool filter systems that disinfect the water in the pool
by running it past a strong UV light. Some municipalities
do the same thing to augment the chlorine that treats
drinking water. You can even buy a device that uses

(01:37):
UV light to disinfect your toothbrush. In Third World countries,
there have been experiments using clear plastic soda bottles filled
with contaminated drinking water. People leave the bottles in the
sun and it actually helps to reduce bacteria in their water.
So putting your rug or mattress out in the sun
for a couple of hours won't hurt and it might

(01:58):
help get rid of some of the Do you have
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