rdewald's Journal: A plea for bacterial diversity.

First, I've said this before, but I don't think I've really given it the attention it deserves before. A story on the front page (remember the front page? [insert JImmy Page riff here]) touches on it, but I'm going to make one last screaming rant.

Do not use antibacterial soap, particularly if you have children in your household. You are weakening immune systems and making the world safer for lethal bacteria. Antibacterial soaps only exert anti-bacteriocidal action on the kinds of bacteria we have lots of antibiotics for. If you can kill it with antibacterial house soap, you can kill it with penicillin, erythromycin, amoxicillin, et al. All the cheap and safe antibiotics.

All of the other bacteria, the ones for which we do not have good antibiotics, are then left with massively reduced competition for food, water and oxygen. You might as well put out a welcome mat, you just bought their room service.

ALSO, and PLEASE LISTEN, the real cleansing action of soap is related to it's ability to dissolve lipids and wash stuff down the drain with water. *That's* why your hands are clean, not because of the bacteriocidal properties of the soap. Please.

But, the problem is, ANY soap does this well, which makes the cheapest soap no less valuable for the purpose of household disinfection than ANYTHING ELSE, which means the sales are going to go to the lowest price point unless they can come up with a reason to scare people into spending more money. Hello, Mr. Clean.

It wouldn't really matter if the only problem was that people spend more money on soap than necessary. The problem is that antibacterial household soaps alter the ecologic balance of the microscopic flora *out* of our favor for the purposes of environmental health. More dangerous bacteria are favored, immune systems are exposed to lower levels of more common bacterial flora, there's no good news here except for soap company profits.

Stop it. It's simple. Stop.

Your Link Is Broken

[Real World Stuff]

A differnt opinion [nnff.org].

Re:Your Link Is Broken

[rdewald]

linkage fixed, thanks.

Science. [cdc.gov]

I hate anti-bacterial crap.

[Some Woman]

It's getting so that it's lurking around every corner.

"Oo! Yummy smelling soap! FUCK! It's antibacterial!" *puts soap back on shelf* *grabs boring soap and sulks to cashier*

Communal pastures

[naoursla]

Isn't this sort of a tragedy of the commons? It is in my best interest to use anti-bacterial soap but have everyone else not use it.

my solution

[SolemnDragon]

i use alcohol.

I have immune issues, sure, and i'm sick every 2 weeks with a cold or the flu or some virus or other (which won't be affected by antibiotics anyway.)

So i use the hand sanitiser stuff or good old alcohol wipes. I don't really know what else to do- it's not in my best interest to use antibiotic soaps all the time. I have an antibiotic dish/hand soap in the house, b ut we try not to use it most of the time (we have a dishwasher, so the bottle generally lasts five months or so.)

We have LOTS of bot

Yup

[jawtheshark]

My mom has always been wary of all those special sopes. Her credo was: if you can't get it clean with normal soap and water, you're doing something wrong. She also allowed us to play oustide *all the time*, including when it was raining, snowing. Came home, dirty from playing in the mud: no problem, undress in the basement/garage and go up for a nice warm bath. (With normal soap of course).

Me? I have zero allergies and I'm pretty much never ever sick. Guess I've just got an excellent immune system b

My dad's big beef

[eglamkowski]

was exactly that you are washing the bacteria off the skin anyways, so it doesn't matter whether or not you kill them - they're going away either way.

Unfortunately, when it comes to bars of soap, the anti-bacterial soaps often ARE the cheapest... Except for Dove or Jergens, the girly soaps ;-)