Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Saturday September 03 2016, @07:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the washing-their-hands-of-it dept.

In a final ruling announced Friday, the Food and Drug Administration is pulling from the market a wide range of antimicrobial soaps after manufacturers failed to show that the soaps are both safe and more effective than plain soap. The federal flushing applies to any hand soap or antiseptic wash product that has one or more of 19 specific chemicals in them, including the common triclosan (found in antibacterial hand soap) and triclocarbon (found in bar soaps). Manufacturers will have one year to either reformulate their products or pull them from the market entirely.

[...] The ruling does not affect alcohol-based hand sanitizers or wipes, which the agency is reviewing separately. It also does not affect antiseptic products used in healthcare settings.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/fda-bans-antibacterial-soaps-no-scientific-evidence-theyre-safe-effective/


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by Francis on Saturday September 03 2016, @11:28PM

    by Francis (5544) on Saturday September 03 2016, @11:28PM (#397172)

    As far as medicine goes, microbes don't cause diseases, microbes in places they shouldn't be an in proportions they shouldn't be can cause disease. And that's not the current germ theory that the medical establishment is working with.

    If we abuse the term some sufficiently, we can come to the conclusion you have. But, at some point, you do have to just admit that the current theory is so woefully insufficient that it's going to kill us all. How many people are going to need to die from MRSA and other antibiotic resistant microbes before the theory gets yanked in favor of something that's a bit more effective?

    Not to mention unnecessary amputations when antibiotics don't work or liver disease from harsh chemicals being used in a misguided attempt to kill bacteria?

  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday September 04 2016, @02:00AM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 04 2016, @02:00AM (#397208) Journal

    microbes don't cause diseases, microbes in places they shouldn't be an in proportions they shouldn't be can cause disease.

    That's got a bunch of ill-defined conditions in it. I can give them values that make it work correctly, but those look like unstable states. In particular, it's almost(?) never true that one or two microbes of whatever kind in whatever place will cause a disease, but if they like the environment they won't stop at one or two, and populations of even usually harmless microbes can cause diseases. And what constitutes "a lot" varies with the kind of microbe, IIRC the classic example of this is cholera. Wikipedia says "About 100 million bacteria must typically be ingested to cause cholera in a normal healthy adult."

    It's also true that most microbes appear harmless, but even symbiotes can be deadly when their populations run out of check.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.