FDA Orders Antibacterials Removed from Consumer Soaps • Hacker News Board

Re: FDA Orders Antibacterials Removed from Consumer Soaps

#121

Post by initram » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 5:31 PM UTC

frandroid wrote: post #56

fastball wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about cooking? e.g. handling raw meat and such?

We seem doing well with most workers in butcher shops and restaurants just washing their hands with regular soap.

Are they, though? I suspect most butcher shops and restaurants are using antibacterial soap at this point. I go out of my way to try to buy non-antibacterial soap and it's often impossible to find. I imagine most businesses just order whatever's the first thing they see in the catalog/web site, and it's probably antibacterial because that's what most people think they want at home.

Re: FDA Orders Antibacterials Removed from Consumer Soaps

#122

Post by busyant » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 5:31 PM UTC

deelowe wrote: post #103

fastball wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about cooking? e.g. handling raw meat and such?

What's wrong with regular soap? It worked fine for decades. You don't need to kill the bacteria. Just remove it.

Soap is a remarkably good antibacterial as well. Im on mobile but will try to look up refs for this later. I used to work in this area and a colleague was an expert on antibacterial properties of detergents.

Re: FDA Orders Antibacterials Removed from Consumer Soaps

#123

Post by busyant » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 5:31 PM UTC

deelowe wrote: post #103

fastball wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about cooking? e.g. handling raw meat and such?

What's wrong with regular soap? It worked fine for decades. You don't need to kill the bacteria. Just remove it.

Soap is a remarkably good antibacterial as well. Im on mobile but will try to look up refs for this later. I used to work in this area and a colleague was an expert on antibacterial properties of detergents.

Re: FDA Orders Antibacterials Removed from Consumer Soaps

#124

Post by nommm-nommm » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 5:33 PM UTC

Kenji wrote: post #116

nommm-nommm wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not violent to disallow me to sell you some random substances. You're being hyperbolic to the extreme.

Okay, what happens if I try to sell you random substances and the authorities dispatch police officers to stop me and I do not comply because I want to exercise my right to trade with you? I can tell you. Violence. If you disagree with me again, I am going to punch you, but it's not violence because I'm not doing it if you don't do it again ;)

You don't have a right to endanger public health.

Re: FDA Orders Antibacterials Removed from Consumer Soaps

#125

Post by pnathan » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 5:34 PM UTC

vxNsr wrote: post #11

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

Kirk's Castile is pretty nice.

https://www.amazon.com/Kirks-Natural-Castile-Soap-Original/d...

Re: FDA Orders Antibacterials Removed from Consumer Soaps

#126

Post by allengeorge » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 5:35 PM UTC

Kenji wrote: post #97

greglindahl wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason that we've had so many people hurt by nutritional supplements is that they're allowed to add anything until it's proven to be unsafe. In the medical field, which has strict rules today, it was the era of dangerous and ineffective "patent medicine" that caused our existing policies to be created. If you're going to advocate change, don't you think it's important to understand historical and modern examples…

I am certain that the FDA, with its ban on certain substances, has caused more deaths and misery than it has ever prevented. Not to mention financial losses. Before you ask accusory questions, why not refine your own position and brush off the smugness?

Examples then? Are are you speaking only in unverifiable "if only" hypotheticals?

Re: FDA Orders Antibacterials Removed from Consumer Soaps

#127

Post by allengeorge » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 5:35 PM UTC

Kenji wrote: post #97

greglindahl wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason that we've had so many people hurt by nutritional supplements is that they're allowed to add anything until it's proven to be unsafe. In the medical field, which has strict rules today, it was the era of dangerous and ineffective "patent medicine" that caused our existing policies to be created. If you're going to advocate change, don't you think it's important to understand historical and modern examples…

I am certain that the FDA, with its ban on certain substances, has caused more deaths and misery than it has ever prevented. Not to mention financial losses. Before you ask accusory questions, why not refine your own position and brush off the smugness?

Examples then? Are are you speaking only in unverifiable "if only" hypotheticals?

Re: FDA Orders Antibacterials Removed from Consumer Soaps

#128

Post by eli » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 5:35 PM UTC

AstralStorm wrote: post #120

underdown wrote: post #102

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.

It is not heavy-handed at all. Educational campaigns have no chance against strong marketing. How many smokers quit due to them?

Smoking rates are declining in most of the world due in a large part to educational campaigns and warning labels.

I agree with the FDA ban, but I don't think smoking is the best way to make your point.

Re: FDA Orders Antibacterials Removed from Consumer Soaps

#129

Post by justratsinacoat » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 5:36 PM UTC

balabaster wrote: post #74

Taking the article at face value: 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 a…

>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).

[0] https://xkcd.com/641/

Re: FDA Orders Antibacterials Removed from Consumer Soaps

#130

Post by Vraxx » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 5:37 PM UTC

cthalupa wrote: post #96

Vraxx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the big one is that it's a joint effort as a society to not continually strengthen bacteria by selecting for strains that are resistant to these antimicrobials.

I think the main problem is we haven't seen bacteria develop a resistance to antiseptics, so it's a fear based on a what if that seems unlikely based on hundreds of years of antispetic use. There have been a small number of laboratory studies that imply it might be possible with triclosan, but they used extremely low levels of triclosan, and real world studies have basically shown the opposite. http://ec.europa.eu/he…

Hmm. Yeah, it does read from this analysis that it seems to be more of a fear rather than a confirmed fact. At this point they may be just being overly cautious I suppose. From the abstract they seem to rule out a lot of the posed threats and leave the rest as "Have not been accurately studied".

As far as I've read from this though, it doesn't apply to the use of actual antibiotics, which do cause strain resistance. That is the issue that I am definitely in support of, and it seems I wrongly correlated anti-bacterial soaps in that issue as a fact when it does not appear to be so.