EA - Does the US public support ultraviolet germicidal irradiation technology for reducing risks from pathogens? by Jam Kraprayoon

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Does the US public support ultraviolet germicidal irradiation technology for reducing risks from pathogens?, published by Jam Kraprayoon on February 3, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryUltraviolet germicidal irradiation technology (UVGI) or germicidal UV light (GUV) represents a promising technology for reducing catastrophic biorisk and would likely confer near-termist benefits as wellTwo subtypes of UVGI, upper-room UVC and far-UVC, seem like particularly promising ways to reduce indoor pathogen transmission.Understanding the level of support for and awareness of these technologies, what framings of benefits are most compelling, and what concerns exist should be helpful for developing strategies around advocacy and expanding deployment.We ran four online surveys in November and December 2022 to better understand US public attitudes towards these technologies. As far as we know, these were the first surveys done on US public attitudes towards GUV light as a means of reducing risks from pathogens.The results of these surveys seem to confirm and disconfirm intuitions in the biosecurity/indoor air quality community around public attitudes towards GUV technology.Survey results show moderate awareness of GUV light and low awareness of far-UVC light.Despite low levels of awareness, once respondents were provided with a description of the technology, support for GUV light and its subtypes was broadly positive.Safety concerns seem to be a meaningful factor in public perception of this technology. Respondents' most prominent concern was that GUV lights need additional testing to establish more evidence on safety and efficacy.Contrary to the assumption in the indoor air quality community that since far-UVC involves direct light exposure to humans, people are less likely to support it, we find respondents consistently showed slightly greater support for far-UVC over upper-room UVC.Also, contrary to the view that terminology for GUV light that includes UV will get less support due to UV’s association with cancer (e.g., far-UVC vs low-wavelength light), our survey shows no statistically significant difference in support when using terms that mention UV vs don’t mention UV.The attitudes expressed by poll respondents in response to broad questions may not be reliable indicators of actual support for specific policies or messages. It would be better to test people's responses to more detailed messages and policy proposalsThere are further investigations that can be done to tease out different explanations for some of the main findings mentioned in the write-up, to find out whether these results hold across countries, and to gauge public support for indoor air quality more generally.MethodsWe ran four online surveys in November and December 2022. In survey 1, respondents were asked whether they had previously heard of ‘germicidal UV’ (GUV) and ‘far UVC’ as ways to reduce pathogen transmission. They were also asked to provide an open comment on what they currently knew about both technologies.In survey 2, respondents were presented with a description of germicidal UV light and asked to consider how positively or negatively they felt about the technology for reducing pathogen transmission, the extent to which they would support efforts to deploy germicidal UV in public spaces, and what benefits and concerns they had about this technology.In survey 3, we tested people’s support for three different types of UV light: germicidal UV, far-UVC, and upper-room UVC. We also tested whether including diagrams for far-UVC and upper-room UVC would affect peoples’ support (Figures 1 and 2 below).Figure 1: Diagram illustrating use of an upper room UVC systemFigure 2: Diagram illustrating use of a far-UVC systemIn survey 4, we tested the effect of five different message...