Good. It's pointless to disinfect and reinfect your hands so many times in a day. Soap should be used to make lipids and other grime water-soluble. That's it.
If you need to sterilize your hands, then you should use a separate product dedicated to that because chances are you are a doctor.
Not sterilizing your hands all the time is actually good (in most cases) because it allows your body to sample the latest and greatest baddies and keep immunity up-to-date.
> Not sterilizing your hands all the time is actually good (in most cases) because it allows your body to sample the latest and greatest baddies and keep immunity up-to-date.
The other reason people shouldn't be using harsh chemicals on their hands is because it damages the skin, and thus creates a better environment for bacterial contamination.
> Issues regarding hand hygiene practices among health-care professionals have been widely discussed and may be even more complicated than those in the general public. Unless patient care involves invasive procedures or extensive contact with blood and body fluids, current guidelines recommend plain soap for handwashing (38,39); however, infection rates in adult or neonatal intensive care units or surgery may be further reduced when antiseptic products are used (40-42).
Un-ban [something] because it's not really harmful and it's about choice of what I do with my body
I never understood which someyhing to put in which category. Perhaps you can argue that no one gets any utility for the thing you want to ban since it's a fraud, but people are spending their money on that thing so surely they get some utility. Not really my place to say
After traveling on the subway and picking up various germs should one make sure to put their hands in their mouth and eyes to sample the "latest and greatest"?
We have no evidence that surgeons scrubbing before donning gloves makes sense either. In fact, there's an undergraduate experiment where people scrub for up to 3-4 minutes and swab after every 10 seconds and plate the swab. The plates actually show more colony-forming units until about 3 minutes, which is much longer than most surgeons scrub. Which suggests that the scrubbing actually liberates bacteria found at the margin of the stratum corneum.
EDIT: Some surgeons argue that having a beard can carry more bacteria into a surgery room, while others argue that shaving might make the surgeon more susceptible to infection by bacteria from the surgery room, since epitelial cells are removed by the razor blade.
How sure are you about this? There's usually some kind of timer (and, sometimes, an assistant) to ensure that you wash for the specified amount of time.
Also, I always figured that scrubbing was essentially a precaution in case the gloves ripped or snagged (which, being thin latex, is far from improbable).
> Companies will no longer be able to market antibacterial washes with these ingredients because manufacturers did not demonstrate that the ingredients are both safe for long-term daily use ...
Then why were they allowed to market them in the first place? If safety was an issue, and it demonstrably is because that's one reason they're being pulled, then why did they not have to prove before marketing?
Really happy about this - literally just ranted to my partner this week about how we should ban antibacterial soap. It has no place outside of a hospital, and is only contributing to the problems we're facing.
Is there any reason why these companies would include a seemingly ineffective element into their product other than being able to say "antibacterial" on the label? It couldn't possibly have been CHEAPER to add them to soaps when it became the new meta, so it'd be interesting if marketing was the sole reason for it.
For the same reason it was effective for marketing: It wasn't immediately obvious _to anyone_ that the additives were ineffective.
Very very often human beings have to make decisions based on incomplete data. If it had turned out that antibiotics in soap saved lives what would we be saying if the industry that had waited years for iron clad proof before taking the relatively inexpensive step of putting it in?
Marketing to consumer misinformation is common. And once one company does it, others need to follow, because the cost of educating the consumer far out ways the cost of just following a trend.
As the article mentions, triclosan can be effective in a completely different setting. It reminds me of another recent study that showed phenylephrine HCL gets metabolised too quickly to do any good when taken orally, even though it's very effective as a nasal spray. Many people switched to it when pseudoephedrine HCL/Sudafed went behind the counter, but the pills literally don't do anything they say they do.
It's called "blue crystals" in marketing jargon, after literal blue crystals and other pointless things. Anything that can be used for market differentiation or that creates a "health aura" effect can boost sales.
I wonder if the public policy intent of this regulation could have been met by permitting soaps to label themselves as antibacterial without containing any of the prohibited compounds (or even lie about containing them).
Soap is pretty antibacterial by itself. ... and now I wonder if we'll next see a wave of soaps containing various reactive nanoparticles what whatever potentially not healthy stuff they'll use to address the fact that the public thinks it wants to buy something that is antibacterial.
I saw some funny old ads from the 50s for toothpaste and mouthwash WITH CHLOROPHYLL!
Same thing there, it had probably just entered shared knowledge, it sounded sciency and natural at the same time, so why not add it to toothpaste? It must be good, right?
Completely worthless, pure marketing gimmick, yet people bought it.
The same reason why we see sugar with label "carbon free" and water with label "no GMO". Marketing. Yes, it gets old with time and they have to look for the next gimmick. But if that brings them some income in the meantime, that's what they do.
Someone elsewhere made the point that if there was any financial (or practical, since better soap = more money) benefit to the companies from keeping these chemicals in, you can bet they would have lobbied like hell to protect their ingredient list.
Finally! . No more Triclosan and other dangerous stuff. I stopped using antibacterial soap a while ago. Switched to Method and have been using that brand for all my cleaning needs. Triclosan is also present in facial cleansing stuff and lots of other products like toothpaste etc. Scary stuff.
What about hand sanitizers? Should we not be using those as well or is limited usage (say keeping a bottle in the car for use before you scarf down a McDouble) ok?
Hand sanitizers are generally alcohol-based. The scientific consensus is that bacteria can't evolve resistance to alcohol any more than they can evolve resistance to (say) chlorine bleach. We just can't use it internally in effective concentrations, because at such concentrations it's also poisinous to the patient.
I too am interested in this documentation. I'm aware of concerns going back over more than a decade, when somebody stopped me in the grocery store to warn me about the BPA in plastic liners in a can of crushed tomatoes. Since then I've kept an eye on the situation. This has turned up plenty of concerns, and a lot of "folk" documentation of harm.
However, I haven't seen relevant scientific documentation that would indicate that the FDA should act. If there is some documentation, there should be a lawsuit to force the FDA to act. There are plenty of interested watchdog groups that would fund something like that.
If you can provide that, I'm getting on the phone today to start lobbying.
Documented harm? Come on, stop making things up. There are hints at correlations between BPA exposure and adverse health effects. There are animal studies with extremely high doses.
But there is no direct evidence of adverse health effects on any humans caused by BPA.
I guess I'm weird; I have no idea why the government has the ability to dictate what is and isn't in the soap that I choose to buy.
I agree however, anti-bacterial soap is silly. Looks like a lot of people here agree. Looks like a market segment to me. Didn't need a gun, theft, or a jail cell to create it.
Also, this may sound silly, but does "anti-bacterial" vs. "anti-septic" factor in here? Could soap just be made more caustic to achieve the same effect without drugs?
Interesting I knew that this was all marketing from previous reading but I had trouble finding a soap that didn't say anti-bacterial that was cheaper so I just went with it
So they can order the removal of anti-bacterial agents because they haven't scientifically been proven beneficial and there are potentially unknown side effects. Err on the side of caution, that's a wise decision.
... yet they use terms like GRAS (Generally Regarded as Safe) for things like Roundup Ready crops which have been scientifically (allegedly, I haven't read and understood all the science, but it seems reasonably credible to the layman) proven to contain significantly increased doses of POISON in food on the supermarket shelves which (admittedly unproven but) highly suspiciously correlated skyrocketing food allergies.
I don't get it (genuinely). Why one application of a seemingly sane rule with unknown repercussions in one instance and a complete disregard for it in the other in the face of a huge amount of evidence that it is in fact unsafe?
Is this because antibacterial agents in soaps are not funded by Monsanto? (okay, I asked that facetiously, but still)
>Is this because antibacterial agents in soaps are not funded by Monsanto? (okay, I asked that facetiously, but still)
I mean, basically, yeah. Firstly, there's no market-spanning hand sanitizer megacorp (megacorps make hand sanitizer, but there's lots of them all doing it). I'm not scientifically convinced that Monsanto's shit is bad, necessarily, but I do know that they fuckin' run shit along multiple axes in the agribusiness world. Monopoly + legally-ironclad yearly subscription and licensing generally equals abuse, on some level, in the tech sector, and permanently equating the Big Evil Corp Monsanto with the utopian-futurist promise of GMOs is awful, IMO.
Secondly, banning Roundup/Roundup-Ready stuff means Monsanto instantly loses tons of money, but banning anti-bacterials in hand sanitizer doesn't really make hand sanitizer work less well and probably won't result in much in the way of lost sales. After all, it's not like alcohol-based hand sanitizers aren't killing nearly everything on your hands already. People who buy a lot of hand sanitizer aren't going to _stop_, they just might be irritated about the loss of one of the 9s in the fractional part of the percent of 'bad things' killed. Triclosan et al are basically just the feature-add version of this [0].
Therefore, there's no need for hand-sanitizer-selling megacorps to protect their product by muddying issues of its safety, because the removal of one ingredient, important only because of the extra 9 on the label, doesn't change the product's value to customers or the megacorps. Banning (or even seriously investigating) Round-Up because of health concerns, real or imagined, would immediately harm Monsanto, which is a hueg important megacorp heavily reliant on the civilized world using its pesticide (and pesticide-compatible crops).
I'm not defending Roundup at all, but the kicker here is the antibacterial chemicals don't do anything. If they did prove more effective in cleaning hands, I'd guess the FDA would probably look the other way on the side effects.
The crops that contain Roundup Ready traits (and several other traits including b.t. toxin for insect resistance) are not eaten raw - they are heavily processed.
When you buy cornstarch, you're buying cornstarch. When you're buying ethanol for fuel, you're buying ethanol for fuel.
People don't eat GM corn, they eat products that contain the products of GM corn, having gone through so much processing that it is ridiculous to think any residual roundup is going to be harmful.
There is just no huge amount of evidence that GM crops are harmful to people. There is evidence that things like Roundup Ready corn & insect-resistant corn are better for the environment, because in the first case they reduce tilling (think erosion as huge amounts of soil are disrupted) and in the second they reduce the need for conventional insecticides.
As for the correlation between food allergies, the timescale here is so long you could correlate it with anything. A particularly fitting comparison in this case would seem to be the internet, or perhaps devices shipping with Windows NT kernels. Most data sets I find show the rise starting around 1997, which would be fitting for food allergies and NT kernel adoption. (You might say that NT kernel adoption was much faster than the proliferation of GMOs - you'd be wrong)
A sane explanation that doesn't rely on a boogeyman is that parents aren't exposing their children to contaminants like they used to. There are medical products coming out to address this, but the consensus seems to be that letting kids play outside, not dousing them in Clorox every 5 minutes, and making them eat peanut butter,etc. early enough are likely to be effective.
Finally, I'll leave with this note: anything you buy as a whole or minimally processed food will be essentially devoid of GMO food. You should be much more worried about the high amounts of sugar and sodium in those processed foods as added sugars are well known to be dangerous and unhealthy - the bonus is that if you avoid processed crap you'll also be avoiding GMOs.
But Roundup actually works and works really well. There is no proof that food allergies are related. Anti-bacterial soap isn't proven to work better than regular soap and we have legitimate concerns about anti-bacterial resistance.
23 3rd party Ad site's cookies were blocked (unless my count was off). :-) Glad the FDA wised up, anti-bacterial soap was causing skin rashes for us in my personal opinion.
They also harm your skin, that is protecting you from infection, so get your conclusions, because I don't have any study on it being healthier to use or not to use them.
I feel like a ban is heavy handed. If the government came out with an educational campaign that informed consumers of the dangers of our collective usage of antibacterial soaps and general ineffectiveness I think that would be enough to prevent their widespread usage.
[+] [-] ythl|9 years ago|reply
If you need to sterilize your hands, then you should use a separate product dedicated to that because chances are you are a doctor.
Not sterilizing your hands all the time is actually good (in most cases) because it allows your body to sample the latest and greatest baddies and keep immunity up-to-date.
[+] [-] DanBC|9 years ago|reply
The other reason people shouldn't be using harsh chemicals on their hands is because it damages the skin, and thus creates a better environment for bacterial contamination.
The CDC was saying this years ago. Here's one good article that summarises the evidence in 2001. http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/7/2/70-0225_article
> Issues regarding hand hygiene practices among health-care professionals have been widely discussed and may be even more complicated than those in the general public. Unless patient care involves invasive procedures or extensive contact with blood and body fluids, current guidelines recommend plain soap for handwashing (38,39); however, infection rates in adult or neonatal intensive care units or surgery may be further reduced when antiseptic products are used (40-42).
[+] [-] bko|9 years ago|reply
Un-ban [something] because it's not really harmful and it's about choice of what I do with my body
I never understood which someyhing to put in which category. Perhaps you can argue that no one gets any utility for the thing you want to ban since it's a fraud, but people are spending their money on that thing so surely they get some utility. Not really my place to say
[+] [-] fastball|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arikrak|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lawtonfogle|9 years ago|reply
Education, not prohibition, is needed.
[+] [-] niels_olson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boobsbr|9 years ago|reply
EDIT: Some surgeons argue that having a beard can carry more bacteria into a surgery room, while others argue that shaving might make the surgeon more susceptible to infection by bacteria from the surgery room, since epitelial cells are removed by the razor blade.
[+] [-] mattkrause|9 years ago|reply
How sure are you about this? There's usually some kind of timer (and, sometimes, an assistant) to ensure that you wash for the specified amount of time.
Also, I always figured that scrubbing was essentially a precaution in case the gloves ripped or snagged (which, being thin latex, is far from improbable).
[+] [-] Kristine1975|9 years ago|reply
Wouldn't that mean that after scrubbing the bacteria are no longer there?
[+] [-] a3n|9 years ago|reply
Then why were they allowed to market them in the first place? If safety was an issue, and it demonstrably is because that's one reason they're being pulled, then why did they not have to prove before marketing?
[+] [-] jmcgough|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martincmartin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkane848|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bradleyjg|9 years ago|reply
Very very often human beings have to make decisions based on incomplete data. If it had turned out that antibiotics in soap saved lives what would we be saying if the industry that had waited years for iron clad proof before taking the relatively inexpensive step of putting it in?
[+] [-] bluejekyll|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullc|9 years ago|reply
Soap is pretty antibacterial by itself. ... and now I wonder if we'll next see a wave of soaps containing various reactive nanoparticles what whatever potentially not healthy stuff they'll use to address the fact that the public thinks it wants to buy something that is antibacterial.
[+] [-] henrikschroder|9 years ago|reply
Same thing there, it had probably just entered shared knowledge, it sounded sciency and natural at the same time, so why not add it to toothpaste? It must be good, right?
Completely worthless, pure marketing gimmick, yet people bought it.
[+] [-] nommm-nommm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smsm42|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshvm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] okreallywtf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gshakir|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koolba|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amalcon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrfusion|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epistasis|9 years ago|reply
However, I haven't seen relevant scientific documentation that would indicate that the FDA should act. If there is some documentation, there should be a lawsuit to force the FDA to act. There are plenty of interested watchdog groups that would fund something like that.
If you can provide that, I'm getting on the phone today to start lobbying.
[+] [-] solipsism|9 years ago|reply
But there is no direct evidence of adverse health effects on any humans caused by BPA.
[+] [-] djschnei|9 years ago|reply
I agree however, anti-bacterial soap is silly. Looks like a lot of people here agree. Looks like a market segment to me. Didn't need a gun, theft, or a jail cell to create it.
[+] [-] sitkack|9 years ago|reply
What is happening now that will get "fixed" in 38 years. This is great news, but what is being done to reduce this latency?
How about having over arching goals of separating people and chemicals, that all chemicals need approval before being introduced into the environment!
[+] [-] sitkack|9 years ago|reply
> The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act
https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-t...
[+] [-] unethical_ban|9 years ago|reply
Antibacterial soap is unhealthy and should be banned for health reasons.
Antibacterial soap is largely ineffective, so should be banned for false advertising reasons.
Antibacterial soap should not be banned.
Which one is right? Is there any science or ethical political philosophy to justify this executive action?
[+] [-] mrfusion|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philip1209|9 years ago|reply
Also, this may sound silly, but does "anti-bacterial" vs. "anti-septic" factor in here? Could soap just be made more caustic to achieve the same effect without drugs?
[+] [-] greglindahl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Terr_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vxNsr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|9 years ago|reply
No more soccer mom directed ads pumping BS about how good it is to have your kids live in a bacterial bubble
The same crappy thinking that brought us allergy epidemics
[+] [-] balabaster|9 years ago|reply
So they can order the removal of anti-bacterial agents because they haven't scientifically been proven beneficial and there are potentially unknown side effects. Err on the side of caution, that's a wise decision.
... yet they use terms like GRAS (Generally Regarded as Safe) for things like Roundup Ready crops which have been scientifically (allegedly, I haven't read and understood all the science, but it seems reasonably credible to the layman) proven to contain significantly increased doses of POISON in food on the supermarket shelves which (admittedly unproven but) highly suspiciously correlated skyrocketing food allergies.
I don't get it (genuinely). Why one application of a seemingly sane rule with unknown repercussions in one instance and a complete disregard for it in the other in the face of a huge amount of evidence that it is in fact unsafe?
Is this because antibacterial agents in soaps are not funded by Monsanto? (okay, I asked that facetiously, but still)
[+] [-] justratsinacoat|9 years ago|reply
I mean, basically, yeah. Firstly, there's no market-spanning hand sanitizer megacorp (megacorps make hand sanitizer, but there's lots of them all doing it). I'm not scientifically convinced that Monsanto's shit is bad, necessarily, but I do know that they fuckin' run shit along multiple axes in the agribusiness world. Monopoly + legally-ironclad yearly subscription and licensing generally equals abuse, on some level, in the tech sector, and permanently equating the Big Evil Corp Monsanto with the utopian-futurist promise of GMOs is awful, IMO.
Secondly, banning Roundup/Roundup-Ready stuff means Monsanto instantly loses tons of money, but banning anti-bacterials in hand sanitizer doesn't really make hand sanitizer work less well and probably won't result in much in the way of lost sales. After all, it's not like alcohol-based hand sanitizers aren't killing nearly everything on your hands already. People who buy a lot of hand sanitizer aren't going to _stop_, they just might be irritated about the loss of one of the 9s in the fractional part of the percent of 'bad things' killed. Triclosan et al are basically just the feature-add version of this [0].
Therefore, there's no need for hand-sanitizer-selling megacorps to protect their product by muddying issues of its safety, because the removal of one ingredient, important only because of the extra 9 on the label, doesn't change the product's value to customers or the megacorps. Banning (or even seriously investigating) Round-Up because of health concerns, real or imagined, would immediately harm Monsanto, which is a hueg important megacorp heavily reliant on the civilized world using its pesticide (and pesticide-compatible crops).
[0] https://xkcd.com/641/
[+] [-] roasm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nxc18|9 years ago|reply
When you buy cornstarch, you're buying cornstarch. When you're buying ethanol for fuel, you're buying ethanol for fuel.
People don't eat GM corn, they eat products that contain the products of GM corn, having gone through so much processing that it is ridiculous to think any residual roundup is going to be harmful.
There is just no huge amount of evidence that GM crops are harmful to people. There is evidence that things like Roundup Ready corn & insect-resistant corn are better for the environment, because in the first case they reduce tilling (think erosion as huge amounts of soil are disrupted) and in the second they reduce the need for conventional insecticides.
As for the correlation between food allergies, the timescale here is so long you could correlate it with anything. A particularly fitting comparison in this case would seem to be the internet, or perhaps devices shipping with Windows NT kernels. Most data sets I find show the rise starting around 1997, which would be fitting for food allergies and NT kernel adoption. (You might say that NT kernel adoption was much faster than the proliferation of GMOs - you'd be wrong)
A sane explanation that doesn't rely on a boogeyman is that parents aren't exposing their children to contaminants like they used to. There are medical products coming out to address this, but the consensus seems to be that letting kids play outside, not dousing them in Clorox every 5 minutes, and making them eat peanut butter,etc. early enough are likely to be effective.
See: [http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/4/12371552/aralyte-peanut-but...]
Finally, I'll leave with this note: anything you buy as a whole or minimally processed food will be essentially devoid of GMO food. You should be much more worried about the high amounts of sugar and sodium in those processed foods as added sugars are well known to be dangerous and unhealthy - the bonus is that if you avoid processed crap you'll also be avoiding GMOs.
[+] [-] parineum|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonknee|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blockednbcads|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Question1101|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcosdumay|9 years ago|reply
They also harm your skin, that is protecting you from infection, so get your conclusions, because I don't have any study on it being healthier to use or not to use them.
[+] [-] underdown|9 years ago|reply