On Aug 5, 1:48 pm, (paghat) wrote:
In article
, Chris



wrote:
On Aug 4, 7:09 am, Pat Kiewicz wrote:
paghat said:

Another garden health issue is tetanus, which lives in most garden soils.
As we get older'n'older we become increasingly susceptible to tetanus.
One-third of tetanus cases are from gardening injuries. Stay updated with
tetanus shots (stay updated with ten-year boosters); try to wear gloves
for most gardening duties; and habitually clean injuries with
antibacterial soap.

I would interrupt here to say that while it's a good idea to wash
gardening injuries with antibacterial soap, it is NOT a good idea to
use it indiscriminately (and I know you didn't say that). This is a
case where more is definitely not better. Bacteria develop resistance
to triclosan (the ingredient in almost all antibacterial soaps) very
rapidly.
(My lab found bugs growing ON the stuff after just three
exposures).

Some bacterias almost feed on the stuff, or at least have an ability to
pump triclosan out of their cells, so it would never harm them ever. Such
bacterias are few in genus but those few can be bad ones, especially
Staph. But if you work in a lab that has shown triclosan to be more
broadly useless against bacteria, that's something that should be reframed
as a measurable study, peer-reviewed, and published, as it would
contradict a vast amount of good data, which wouldn't be the first time
good data was wrong or incomplete.

Save it for when your skin is actually broken.

Chris

snip

Regular soap would be perfectly all right for the job if people tended to
wash for a full minute or so at each spot, but nobody does. Also even
antibacterial soap won't really do much if tetanus is driven deep into the
skin by a thorn or whatnot, and the real protection will always be the
preventive measures, vis, tetanus vaccination.

I have a "squirt bottle" of antibacterial soap that I rarely use except
when I've gotten scratches from the garden, or had cause to handle the
dog's poo. I otherwise use an array of fancy-ass "hand crafted" scented
soaps made with olive oil or other non-animal-product bases.

One lame study "proved" antibacterial soap in household use did not cut
down on the incident or severity of the common cold, and it's often cited
as even lamer proof that it serves no value whatsoever. Virtually all the
"anti-triclosan" literature on the web is generated by politicos who don't
care at all about the science (which alas is insufficient to draw any
conclusive information). For example, the Grinning Planet web page (as
random example) that insists triclosan does not cut down on household
germs in the next paragraph blast the product because children raised in a
germ-free environment have poor immune systems.

Many such pages insist even that Triclosan is an antibiotic causing germ
resistance to all other antibiotics. It's not an antibiotic, and there's
no valid science to suggest it has any negative influence on antibiotic
effectiveness. When Dr. Levy posited the POSSIBILITY of bacteria
developing triclosan resistance, he said this would be EQUIVALENT to
antibiotic resistance. It gets transmuted by revisionists who just want it
to be scarier. A good body of peer-reviewed science does exist on this
matter and to date it all shows that triclosan has no impact on antibiotic
viability. It is nevertheless a reasonable speculation that some future
nasty germ will have separate resistance to antibiotics and to
antisceptics, which definitely wouldn't be cool.

Levy's lab at Tufts is really one of the leaders in the study of
triclosan resistance. I was unaware that some people had conflated
tricloasan resistance to antibiotic resistance- that's just silly.
They have completely different modes of action (although there have
been some papers- good ones- that link antiseptic resistance to
antibiotic resistance, it seems rare, thank goodness). However, when
triclosan was first becoming popular in household products, the claim
was made that it inhibited such a wide variety of metabolic steps that
resistance was highly unlikely to appear, at least anytime soon.
Levy's lab showed this was false; triclosan disrupts a particular step
in fatty acid metabolism, and that's pretty much it.

The danger isn't that widespread use of triclosan will foster
antibiotic resistance, it's that it's easy for many bacteria to evolve
resistance to triclosan itself, rendering it useless for situations in
which it is really needed. No one needs to wash with antibacterial
soap every time the enter a toilet. To my certain knowledge, these
bugs develop resistance to triclosan in short order: E. coli, Bacillus
subtilis, B. cereus, B. megaterium, Staphylococcus aureus, S.
epidermae, Micrococcus luteus. Only a couple of those are disease
causing organisms, but that's quite a spread there. It at least
implies that a lot of critters can develop resistance pretty quickly.

Chris




An additional scare tactic is to suggest triclosan causes cancer. Studies
show it to be carcinogenic to animals if it first combines with chlorine
producing carcinogenitic chloroform, and if it is then injested. There is
a small amount of chloroform gas in virtually all municiple water, not
regarded as hazardous, though if it's worrisome, guarding against soap
wouldn't be the defense. Drinking only flavorless distilled water would be
the defense.

I'm all for checking out the worst case scenarios for things as the
vendors will always provide the least honest information. But when
activists mix the improbable with the impossible with a few actual facts,
not very useful. Your advice "save it for when your skin is actually
broken" is useful.

Some realistic considerations without hysteric additions would include: 1)
We're exposed to way too many chemicals every hour of every day with no
idea of how they combine or what the total load can do, so limiting
chemical exposures isn't apt to be a bad idea. 2) Small amounts won't harm
septic tank drainage fields but overuse has at least that possibilitly. 3)
Triclosan is in so many bathroom products that it's hard to know when one
is using it, which is at least annoying. It can even be in toothpastes
(it's in Crest and Sensodyne) which makes some of the extremists' warnings
closer to valid since injestion becomes likely, with resultant hormone
distruption and other potential hazards from eating it.

If one is willing to wash vigorously with ordinary soap for a much greater
length of time than is natural for most people, then ordinary pure soap is
good enough. I know that I'm always in a rush so I do keep the
antibacterial squirt-bottle handy for when exposed to poo or scratched in
the garden or playing with rats who no matter how friendly are always
marking everything with pee. Maybe in the future I'll jettison the stuff
as I have with so many ordinary products with all sorts of dubious
chemicals in them, but to date it hasn't sent up alarms for me.

-paghat the ratgirl
--
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