I just love Rod Bescombe's work.

I also wonder if this had the potential to treat Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria.
It would be a godsend if it does.

"Thanks very much for drawing attention to our work in preventing TB transmission.
The ionizers are indeed exciting, but I must emphasize that we used enormous industrial sized ionizers designed for eliminating dust in poultry farms. They definitely need some further work before putting them on a hospital ward. the ionizers you can buy commercially on the internet were pretty pathetic in the number of ions they generated in tests we performed, and would probably have little effect on TB transmission.
The UV light story is very exciting - we saw a 72% reduction in TB transmission from the ward (HIV TB patients) to guinea pigs on the roof. UV lights are already recommended by guidelines for TB control.
Karin Weyer at her team are working in Witbank in SA on a similar project using guinea pigs exposed to air from a TB ward. let's hope they get similar results.

A useful approach to preventing TB transmission is natural ventilation - simply opening windows. we published a big study on this in PLoS Medicine last month - see
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/...al.pmed.0040068
There has been lots of interest in this work - after all, it is an extrtemely simple and low cost intervention, and our modelling predicted a big impact on TB transmission in hospitals, which would equally apply to other crowded settings such as ARV roll-out centre."

“Results: After 501 days there were 110 tuberculin-positives in the control
animals, 53 in ionizer animals, and 30 in UV animals (p<0.001). Kaplan-Meier
analysis of skin test data demonstrated that TB transmission was reduced by
both ionizers (log rank 20.1; p<0.00001) and UV lights (log rank 46.6;
p<0.00001). Autopsy and culture results lag behind skin tests and currently
provide confirmatory evidence that UV is protective (log rank 3.6; p=0.05)
in this ongoing experiment.
Conclusion: Despite Lima’s high humidity, upper room UV lights and negative
air ionizers both prevented the majority of airborne TB transmission and
these interventions should be considered in high-risk clinical settings.”
The Prevention of Airborne TB transmission – Peru
http://www1.imperial.ac.uk/medicine/people/rod.escombe/

This is not about treating bacterial infection, this is about preventing spread of bacteria. It's not about curing TB, it's about making sure that less people get it.
Finally, this isn't about cheap fixes, but about how to build new hospital wards, an inherently costly operation, and there are other economic factors which may come into play. (Preventing the spread of TB might not be the principle deciding factor in hospital construction and architecture.)

The cheap "ionizers" as sold on the Internet, your own source says do nothing, so this is not a cheap, personal solution, and not a "cure" of anything for the individual.

But thanks for trying to play by the rules.

Thanks Mr Penner.

The comments are from Rod Escombe's email BTW....they aren't my comments.

Have a good weekend.