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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

Humidifiers can get dank in many ways. For clarity, these chemicals weren't used to "sanitize" the air, just the devices themselves.

Implicated chemical is: polyhexamethylene guanidine

Per wikipedia:

> Studies have shown that PHMG in solution has fungicidal as well as bactericidal activity against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria.[2] The substance also has detergent, anti-corrosive, and flocculant properties and prevents biofouling.[3] PHMG-P is a white powdered solid,[1] and as all polyguanidine salts, readily soluble in water.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyhexamethylene_guanidine

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I gotta say, the very idea of how this was used sets off alarm bells in my head. They were putting this cleaning agent in the water that was also being aerosolized by the humidifier? At the same time I'm wondering if there are things like this that I / people in the US do that sounds similarly kooky.

Some people don't see issues with this stuff. I dated a girl from Africa for a while, I came home one day to find she was boiling some kind of mopping floor cleaner in one of my cooking pots to scent the house. She got mad at me when I was mad and told her to never do that in my place again and threw the pot away, saying her family does that all the time. I can only imagine what it is they are inhaling.

They were explicitly sold as humidifier sanitizer by "respectable" companies, so people believed it was safe. It's like buying a dish soap - you'd assume that whoever's made the product did the necessary certification to show it won't kill you.

I also bought a bottle of these sanitizer (had two toddlers then), put it into the humidifier a few times, but I was too lazy so that was about it. My laziness probably saved my kids' lives.

There are undoubtedly more things like this waiting to be discovered.

Killing large numbers of people 'statistically' is easy when nobody can identify a direct cause for any individual death. See: air pollutants.

I worry that data privacy laws will slow down the discovery of things like this.

Imagine for example that supermarkets could have said 'oh look, the people that buy this selection of products have a higher chance of hospital admission'.

Except now it's practically illegal for a supermarket (who has product data) do join that with medical records at any reasonable scale. And if you do a study of just a few thousand volunteers, you won't discover something like 'this floor cleaner brand shortens users lifespan by 1 year'.

Instead the problem goes undetected, and tens of thousands or millions die early.

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