Stay Tuned/Kills Germs on Impact

Triclosan is a trade name for a chlorophenol compound with a structure consisting of two linked carbon rings with short chlorine-bearing side chains. Its manufacturer is Ciba Specialty Chemicals (formerly Ciba-Geigy, spun off when Ciba-Geigy became part of Novartis), who prefer to refer to it as Irgasan because they hold the trademark on that name.

It's a topical antibacterial. Its ability to kill surface germs is well-documented, although there are several types of persistent surface germs that it apparently does not affect. Its ability to be absorbed through human skin is open to some dispute.

I began looking into the whys and wherefores of triclosan because I wanted to see who manufactured it. I was using the "follow the money" principle.

Triclosan as a cosmetic additive is big business these days. Nearly all brands of "body care products," and some brands of dishwashing soap, have a liquid soap in their product line which contains it. Unilever daringly offers a bar soap as well.

Dial, a smaller company among giants with little to lose, broke itself away from the soap pack a while back by being the first to drop triclosan into all its liquid and bar soaps. As far as I can tell, no matter what type of Dial soap you buy, it has triclosan, even when the soap is not the gold-orange color which has come to be associated with antibacterial soaps for some odd reason.

Meanwhile, 3M has a process for embedding some antibacterial (maybe not triclosan; they're keeping mum) into woven or molded fibers, allowing themselves and other companies to market dish sponges and cutting boards which "resist germs" forming on their surfaces.

There are shoe inserts with antibacterials, pimple creams, and (ugh) vaginal deodorants - a product I try to avoid mentioning because it is such a loathsome concept to me in the first place; triclosan just adds an extra edge of pariahdom to the idea.

And most recently (as I noted a couple of weeks ago), Colgate has just brought to market a new toothpaste with the stuff - to my knowledge the first time something that contains triclosan is intended to enter your mouth.

Germ phobia. Not to sound xenophobic here, but are we turning into Japan? I swear, if I start to see people walking down the street wearing face masks, I may have to move to a cabin in Montana and start building a few bombs.

As I say, I was looking for triclosan citations on the web, trying to find out who makes the stuff (and is therefore getting rich over it). As I skimmed through a fair number of articles and other detritus, most of which had to do with the Colgate announcement, I noticed that there was a uniformly positive outlook toward this wonder chemical.

True, I learned early on that some people suffer contact dermatitis from it (which is to say, they're allergic to it) - but there's someone out there who's allergic to just about any substance you can name.

And some medical authorities did trouble to point out that, in washing one's hands, it's the scrubbing motion that gets rid of most of the surface germs anyway, and that they were unconvinced that triclosan-containing soaps were any more effective than plain soap and water. I thought that was reasonable enough, but hardly the sort of complaint I was looking for.

You see, I have a theory. I feel that any food, drug, or cosmetic additive of sufficient complexity (i.e. more complicated than water) is going to have, somewhere, a group of citizens protesting its use. We have the most interesting set of group weirdnesses about what we put in or on our bodies. We couldn't care less what we pump into the atmosphere, for the most part, but man, don't get any of that stuff on me!

I didn't have to wander for long before I ran into the dioxin crowd.

As I follow the argument, it goes like this: We make a lot of chemicals called chlorophenols. They're used for a variety of things we have come to find indispensable in this modern world, and they're really tricky to get rid of. They are frequently contaminated by dioxins, which are generated in the course of their manufacture and disposal. Dioxins are incredibly toxic compounds that cause all sorts of pernicious symptoms - in general, in extremely low doses they make you sluggish and sickly, and in slightly larger doses they begin causing serious havoc with your cells, increasing your risk of cancer and so forth.

The most coherent anti-dioxin site I found (one man patiently lobbying away in Massachusetts - must be the water around here) is mighty scary ... but having checked into a little of this, I'm not sure how much I buy into the site's ideas about toxicity of chlorophenols.

I agree that dioxins themselves are nasty nasty, and I agree we shouldn't be burning dioxin-carrying waste - this is a really rotten thing to do because the dioxins get into the ashes and smoke and can then be windborne for many miles. But chlorophenols - not dioxins - are another story, and I feel like if we were really absorbing a lot of dioxins into our systems via chlorophenol exposure, we'd be a lot sicker than we are.

Because if you take this web site at face value, chlorophenols and other potiential dioxin-carriers are in everything. There's a document referenced below which tells how to abolish dioxin-bearing compounds from your home. Most of us would find it extremely difficult to follow half the rules on the list. You'd have to go live in a cave, honest. Have a look and judge for yourself.

On the other hand, there's evidence that this is not just hysteria. Hexachlorophene, the active ingredient in a strong antibacterial soap called pHisoHex, turned out to cause permanent damage - in infants, I believe; the details are below somewhere - and the soap was made a prescription substance in 1972.

Some of the anti-dioxin folks are true zealots. Upon reading some of the comments posted to a bulletin board at essential.org, I got the impression that these are the people who would happily blow up every manufacturing plant in the world, or live their remaining lives in a plastic bubble - the former, while dubious, at least has the virtue of non-passivity.

Whether because of this bad reaction on my part (I despise all zealotry) or because I just don't believe in the threat very strongly, I can't really take the dioxin aspects of triclosan very seriously as a potential hazard.

Conversely, the hazard I do respect - that of increasing germ susceptibility - is not taken seriously by some people, maybe even some of the dioxin people. We all have our favorite fears.

The susceptibility argument goes something like this. We douse ourselves in antibacterials and other such chemicals we don't need ... and in doing so, are training our bodies and our offspring's bodies to lose some of our own inherent germ resistance, by providing this crutch.

Meanwhile, new strains of germ are developing which are totally unaffected by the chemicals. This is purely Darwinian - sooner or later, a germ will gene-shuffle into being which can swim in triclosan without being perturbed, and because of this, it will survive to make more germs.

Sooner or later the supergerm meets our weakened defenses and overpowers them much more easily. We decide we need to develop stronger chemicals and the cycle continues.

This has already been shown to happen with pesticides and antibiotics. However, if it happens with common bacteria - the kind that are around us every day, that we swim in and breathe in and eat and sleep with - it could well have very bad consequences for us.

Some people think this is hooey, pointing out that the current generations of humans are actually more resistant to disease in some ways. Darwinism again. If we get hit too many times by the superflu, sooner or later, a group of humans who happen by random chance to be less susceptible to it will thrive.

As I say, we all have our favorite fears.

No matter which cry of peril you heed, if any, it does seem to be sound policy not to mess with chemicals you don't actually need.

Nonetheless, although I don't plan on buying any of the other triclosan products, I will continue to use my Dial hand soap, as I have for ages. I cut my hands a lot, sometimes on nasty things, and I like that extra measure of protection, choosing to gamble the dioxins I may be absorbing against the reduced possibility of something like, say, tetanus, which kills you lots faster.

Maybe I'm slowly weakening my genes by using the stuff. Then again, since it'll be a cold day in hell before I bear offspring anyway, it seems like my risk assessment is confined to a single individual. And that is a chance I'm willing to take.

[February 2007:] I am sorry to say that Colgate Total, the triclosan toothpaste, is still around and being heavily marketed. Dial was bought by a big German company in 2004 but still carry on more or less as they always have, under their own name. They don't put triclosan in all their personal cleaning products anymore, but they do put it in a large number of their bar and liquid soaps - including ones that are not "antibacterial orange," making it harder to tell it's there.

Although I'm harsh on the anti-dioxin people, I do believe that the threat from burning dioxins is a real and sadly avoidable one. I'll take my own risks with my own person, but no one has the right to put huge numbers of people at risk without their consent.

Amazingly, Jonathan Campbell's site is still around. Two pages which are specifically mentioned above (I have no good way of telling how much their contents have changed, but the URLs are still good) are chicken.htm and edioxin.htm

Here are some other miscellaneous citations of varying content. Some are news stories; one is chemical data for dermatologists; one is an advisory report from the Mayo Clinic, and so forth. (As of February 2007 I have not gone back and checked these links to see if they're still there, since I suspect no one will follow them anyway.)

www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/vumcdept/derm/contact/TR004.html
www.cnnfn.com/hotstories/companies/9707/14/colgate/
www.sdahq.org/sdalatest/html/antibactfaq2.html
nytsyn.com/live/Week/056_022597_154217_31430.html
www.sciam.com/1998/0398issue/0398levybox1.html
nytsyn.com/live/Medicare/153_060297_190016_25189.html
www.mayohealth.org/mayo/9708/htm/antibact.htm

The EPA and the FDA also track this stuff on a fairly regular basis.

and now back to our program

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