
( Read more about how long Covid-19 lasts on surfaces. This only underlines the importance of continually disinfecting and cleaning surfaces that are frequently touched.
Coli and MRSA – can survive for several months on inanimate surfaces, while infectious yeasts can last for weeks. Indeed, the virus that causes Covid-19 – Sars-CoV-2 – can persist on cardboard for up to 24 hours, while on plastic and stainless steel it can remain active for up to three days. “The surfaces we touch in our daily routine can be a vector of transmission,” says Larrouy-Maumus.
Why we should all be wearing face masks. How long does coronavirus last on surfaces?. His plan is to turn the very surfaces that many of these pathogens use to spread from person to person into weapons against them. He is among those looking for new ways to tackle antimicrobial resistance. It means the illnesses they cause are getting harder to treat.Īs Larrouy-Maumus, an infectious disease researcher at Imperial College London in the UK, warns, “If we do nothing, 10 million people per year will die.” At the same time, other disease-causing organisms – fungi, viruses and parasites – are also developing resistance to the drugs we use to tackle them almost as quickly as we can make new ones. Over the past decade or so, the list of medicines we can use against harmful bacteria has been dwindling. It is the potential toll facing the world as disease-causing microbes develop resistance to our best defence against them – antibiotics.Ĭurrently, 700,000 people die each year of drug-resistant diseases. It’s an unfathomable figure, but one that Gerald Larrouy-Maumus mentions often.