British teams have developed a robot that vomits to study how gastroenteritis microbes spread during projections.
Pale face, half-open mouth, heart on the edge of the lips. Vomiting Larry is not a robot like any other. It doesn’t help surgeons operate, or old people get around. His role is quite different: Larry vomits.
A stomach full of germs
For the purposes of science, British researchers have developed this machine capable of simulating human vomiting. It measures 1m 60 and consists of a mannequin head mounted on a cylinder filled with liquid. A compressed air pump system allows the fluid to rise to its mouth. Everything has been programmed: the propulsive force, the direction of the jet, the quantity of regurgitated liquid (these parameters have been the subject of previous studies).
During their experiment, researchers at the Government’s Health and Safety Laboratory in Derbyshire (UK) filled Larry’s “stomach” with a liter of water contaminated with hundreds of millions of microbes from the norovirus – a very virus. widespread and extremely contagious, responsible for millions of gastroenteritis each year worldwide. They then placed the robot in a sealed, sterile chamber and observed it in UV light emptying itself.
8 contaminated square meters
Purpose of the maneuver: to determine the area contaminated by norovius microbes when a sick person returns. And the conclusions, detailed in the review Journal of Infection Prevention, are amazing. So when a person with norovirus vomits, they propel their germs over a radius of 8 square meters – 3 meters in front of them, 2.2 to the sides.
“The samples taken from the surface of the ground have revealed the presence of live virus, in such a proportion that it can infect people who come into contact with the propulsions – including the smallest droplets, three meters in front of Larry” , explains microbiologist Catherine Makison Booth, “mother” of the robot.
On an airplane or in an office
These results thus reveal that the post-vomit cleansing must be done in a particularly rigorous way. Especially since, as the authors of the study point out, microbes can remain alive for several days on contaminated surfaces.
Of course, we can point out that it is quite rare to vomit while standing in a room aiming straight ahead. Studies on the subject certainly deserve to be refined. Moreover, the team of researchers is working on simulations of vomit in different environments – an airplane, a hospital bed, an office …
The objective being, again, to determine which objects can be contaminated, and to what extent. As for the consistency of vomit – a significant parameter – it is also the subject of further work. Larry hasn’t said his last word.
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