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Do we know enough about the safety of quat disinfectants? (2020)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Mistletoe 3y agoI was thinking yesterday how 70% ethanol is like the perfect disinfectant and we don’t use it. It’s what we used when working in sterile conditions when I was a scientist. You certainly wouldn’t use quat disinfectants to spray your gloves before working in a hood. You’d know it would probably get in your experiment and mess it up. Ethanol is perfect, it evaporates and leaves nothing. I assume we don’t use ethanol because people would drink it, or it costs too much. Both aren’t great reasons when safety is what you are throwing out.
- throwup238 3y agoIt evaporates too fast to fully penetrate all surfaces and isn't as effective against a bunch of biological vectors like spores that require prolonged contact to really kill. Quat disinfectants leave a residue behind that continues killing stuff and they're generally less irritating to skin and the respiratory system (though that's for people using the room after it was disinfected, not necessarily for the person doing the disinfecting).
- arijun 3y agoWhat about suspending the ethanol like in alcohol gel? Could we find a gelling agent that is less irritating than the quat disinfectant residue?
- throwup238 3y agoThat works fine for hand sanitizer but it becomes too viscous to spray as disinfectant, which is important for hospitals.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoIt's also very flammable, which is a bit of a problem.
- briHass 3y agoWell, we do use it in most hand-sanitizer solutions. I assume alcohol isn't a popular (home) cleaner because it is volatile and requires high concentrations (70%+) to be effective. From a cost perspective, the Clorox Company no doubt prefers to add a few grams of a quat to multiple gallons of scented water, which means they're basically selling a spray bottle of a nearly-free solution that is 99.5% water for $5. Shipping 70% alcohol also brings with it a Flammability-3 (high) hazard label.
- copperx 3y agoIt should be illegal to sell such unconcentrated solutions, except perhaps in food (e.g., even milk is easily reconstituted). It would be much more efficient to sell the concentrated chemical and let consumers dilute them. Imagine the fuel savings, shelf space savings of not having to ship 99.9% water around the world. I remember some medicines were dispensed like that in the 80s, and the patient had to reconstitute them before using.
- briHass 3y agoYou can usually get concentrated cleaning solutions, but they tend to be used more by industry/businesses. These quats are sold concentrated as dish sanitizer (mixed in a sink full of water) for restaurants, for example. I think consumers would just rather have ready-to-use spray bottles in most cases. There's probably a surprising number of people that couldn't do the basic math of diluting based on a formula.
- Spooky23 3y agoOne of the issues that I discovered during COVID is that alcohol isn’t a scheduled pesticide because it predates the regulation. So applications that are regulated cannot use alcohol unless they can use a listed product, which is rare and expensive
- r3trohack3r 3y agoPersonally I’m a fan of putting a mixture of salt, water, and vinegar through hydrolysis to get sodium hydroxide and hydrogen chloride. Super cheap and effective cleaner, easy to make at home. Only downside is it isn’t shelf stable, so you have to make a new batch every ~2 weeks. Force of nature has a pretty neat kit that automates the chemistry.
- amluto 3y agoYou do what? I’m afraid you have the reaction products wrong. This is the chloralkali process, and you get hydroxide, hydrogen, and chlorine gas. The latter is extremely nasty. If you do it right (which I can almost guarantee you are not doing), it will react with water to form hypochlorite (that’s your fairly safe disinfectant) and chloride (harmless). But this reaction goes the other way in acidic conditions: hypochlorite will turn into chlorine gas. DO NOT run the chloralkali process indoors. DO NOT run it near your face. DO NOT think you’re clever and run it in a closed container — not only is the chlorine toxic, but it can explode when mixed with hydrogen. DO NOT mix bleach-containing products with acids. Just buy plain bleach (the “sanitizing” kind), dilute it carefully with water, and use it in an appropriate concentration. (You can safely do the chloralkali process in a cell with a high flow of salty swimming pool water, with safety measures to turn it off if the flow stops.)
- Filligree 3y agoSpeaking of sanitising bleach, does it have a best-before date? I have a bottle of it sitting around, but it’s quite old and I’m not sure if the date on it is when it was made or when it should be discarded.
- amluto 3y agoProbably discard it. Hypochlorite is unstable, and it loses potency. Or, if you’re feeling adventurous, dilute it 1:20000 or so and measure it with a pool test kit. Also, one of the degradation products is chlorite, which is somewhat nasty. You can find actual research from the swimming pool chemical industry. At higher concentrations (bleach sold for swimming pools is more concentrated), it’s less stable and apparently should ideally be used within 30 days in hot weather. The household stuff ought (good luck!) to be more stable, and you’re probably not storing it in a hot pool equipment room.
- TheJoeMan 3y agoMy company’s product includes a piece of acrylic (PMMA). Ethanol would jellify it, quats are basically our only approved disinfectant.
- dist-epoch 3y agoLots of stuff is resistent to 70% ethanol - norovirus for example.
- londons_explore 3y agoI really want to see stuff like this tested in massive cohorts (ie. 1 billion+ participants) via variable dosing. Here's how it would work: * Companies that make products would randomly increase by 5% or decrease by 5% the dosage of each ingredient in a product headed to a specific town. * The government would publish A/B groupings for every town in the US and every chemical they track. * Average health data would be collected, and whenever a specific chemicals A/B group difference exceeds some threshold, investigation is done. The main downside is production costs of products goes up, since every product will now have a final step of adding all the A/B adjustment doses to the bottle before sealing. But I believe this is worth it for rooting out chemicals that have low level yet very widespread negative effects.
- twisteriffic 3y agoMaybe we should just spray each town from the air and cut out the middleman? While we're at it we can infect a portion with polio just to see what happens.
- MiddleMan5 3y agoSarcasm aside, I agree testing on populations raises a whole bunch of ethical and morality concerns. Also how would we control for environmental health effects, or even interactions between multiple product variances. This kind of testing would be wildly expensive, pose potential public health risks, and the data collected would be coarse and noisy at best
- londons_explore 3y agoThis would only be of substances already approved for general use, and wouldn't expose anyone to any substance they wouldn't otherwise be buying/using. The only difference is it very slightly adjusts the quantity - and does so in a way that is within existing allowed tolerances, so effectively this might already be happening, just we aren't collecting the results.
- 3y ago
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoWe use this stuff to mop the floors where I work. Hmm
- ComputerGuru 3y agoIs it normal to know what is used to wipe the floor?
- sambapa 3y agoYes, if you're a cleaner
- jprival 3y agoIt’s a pretty good bet that quaternary ammonium compounds are used to wipe many surfaces wherever you are. They are probably the most widely used non-chlorine disinfectants.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- boppo1 3y agoThis guy has only ever worked comfy desk jobs.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoYes
- dist-epoch 3y agoYou use mistery unlabeled bottles for cleaning products?
- CodeWriter23 3y agoOf course we do, we have no evidence of harm.
- throw_pm23 3y agoabsence of evidence is very different from evidence of absence
- CodeWriter23 3y agoI am aware of that. It doesn’t stop the talking point of “no evidence of harm” dating back to thalidomide, tobacco and more recent examples.
- ComputerGuru 3y agoFrom 2020. I wonder if there have been updates.
- RachelF 3y agoQuats are widely used in eyedrops as a preservative. Some companies have started to remove them recently.
- xyst 3y agowhen I used to wear monthly contacts, “quats” were used in the disinfecting solution. I only know this because one of the “quats” was my daily used password. Eventually switched to daily contacts for a couple of years before going back to wearing glasses. Then eventually settling on LASIK :)
- colechristensen 3y agoMy eyes are pretty sensitive so i always used the solution that was hydrogen peroxide based and then had a little rock in the case which catalyzed the reaction to neutralize it over hours and you ended up with mostly just saline.
- amluto 3y agoThere are related compounds that people regularly expose themselves to in much higher concentrations: behentrimonium chloride, cetrimonium chloride, and the same cations paired with other anions. They’re used in hair products, apparently in concentrations above 5%. For those who, as the article describes, think they’re maybe harmless unless inhaled, you can buy hair detangling sprays. Maybe you’re supposed to only use them outdoors while hearing a very well-fitting mask?
- KennyBlanken 3y agoI get what you're saying, but I'm a little more concerned about occupational exposure, where people like hospital orderlies are exposed to it for hours every shift, 5-6 days a week, all year and don't have a choice in whether they use it or something else.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kwhitefoot 3y agoWhy do so many people need so many disinfectants? I get by with chlorine bleach for the toilet once in a while. Just ordinary cleanliness and some detergent seems sufficient to me. I never use fabric softeners either.
- ambicapter 3y agoDoes it come as a shock to you that the people making your food, the people working in healthcare, all use disinfectants on a regular basis? From the article also: toothpaste, mouthwash, eye drops.
- Doxin 3y ago> Does it come as a shock to you that the people making your food, the people working in healthcare, all use disinfectants on a regular basis? Yes? I'd expect to mostly see them use soap.
- jamie1np 3y agoQuats are almost exclusively used by industries like food and health care.
- copperx 3y agoAnd the household. I use quats for laundry, too.
- akira2501 3y agoFood safe standards. If you get inspected they will test the concentration, in PPM, of your cleaning product. You can either use a chlorine bleach or quaternary ammonium.
- bitfilped 3y agoI've always used quats over bleach since they don't destroy your clothing.
- 3y ago
- keikobadthebad 3y agoFrom Aug 2020