The risks of cleaning with bleach and other disinfectants | Hacker News Reader

The risks of cleaning with bleach and other disinfectants

nytimes.com

142 pointswalterbell162 comments

http://web.archive.org/web/20230323080410/https://www.nytime...

From the article: "The chemicals in bleach “are persistent in the environment, and they’re also very corrosive,” she added."

This seems incomplete at best and disingenuous at worst.

It's my understanding that chlorine bleach breaks down into oxygen, NaCl, and water.

So, sure, you can argue that salt water is persistent in our environment and also corrosive, but that statement strikes me the same way as how people have long warned about the dangers of ever present dihydrogen monoxide in almost everything we consume these days.

Doesn't most bleach contain stabilizers? Perhaps that part of it. The other possibility is that when bleach reacts with stuff it can form other, more stable compounds.

Either way, I generally agree with your position. Bleach tends to break down pretty quickly compared to many other things.

> Doesn't most bleach contain stabilizers?

Not sure.

SDS for Clorox Regular Bleach: https://www.thecloroxcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/cloroxre...

It lists a single ingredient: sodium hypochlorite.

Ah, I might have been thinking about pool chlorine and some outdoor cleaners.

Pool chlorine is just slightly more concentrated bleach.

You might be thinking of certain types of pool chlorine tablets that include cyanuric acid. Really a terrible way to treat a pool, honestly, it builds up CYA in the water and eventually you can't get enough active chlorine to safely disinfect. And the only realistic way to reduce CYA is drain the pool partly or completely and refill. Properly maintained pool water only needs basic chemicals, and pure sodium hypochlorite (unless you're going to use a chlorine generator, in which case you'll end up buying a few hundred pounds of salt when you fill the pool).

Guess the SDS only covers components that require special handling? They have a page that mentions stabilizers: https://www.clorox.com/learn/what-is-bleach-what-are-active-...

If something in the mixture is potentially hazardous then it goes to mean it should be listed in the SDS?

Cyanuric acid is the stabilizer used in pool chlorine, but even it breaks down relatively quickly in the environment. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4451360/

Also if chlorine is stabilized by cyanuric acid, it is no longer active in the environment - basically the cyanuric acid locks up the chlorine in an equilibrium so that it slow releases, which is why it's widely used in outdoor pools. Otherwise UV exposure would cause the chlorine to offgas rapidly and you'd need to add chlorine every hour or so during the day, which is obviously effort and cost prohibitive.

and it breaks down on it's own, pretty quickly, especially when hit by sun UV rays, which is why you have to chlorinate your pool so often. It also gets diluted easily by water.

Which is why you get a salt-water pool. So much better!

A saltwater pool IS a chlorine pool. The difference is that instead of adding sodium hypochlorite from a jug, you add salt to the water and use electrolysis (chlorine generator) to create chlorine gas and hydrogen.

Properly maintained pool water will have the same chlorine level either way. The "chlorine pool" water won't have quite as much dissolved salt, but over time it does build up.

Chlorine, yes, byproducts, no. And this massively cuts down on irritation & smell.

> irritation & smell

This is not a chlorine problem, this is improperly balanced pool water. Either way too much CYA, requiring a high concentration of chlorine to compensate, or high pH. The latter is the most common reason for irritating water.

You want to fix that in any case. Using a chlorine generator is no panacea, if you have high CYA you'll need high chlorine or it won't disinfect. And if you have high pH, you're not doing good things to your pool equipment.

Definitely worth buying a decent test kit and staying on top of things. It's totally possible to have crystal clear silky smooth odorless pool water, whether you use a chlorine generator or bleach. TFP is a really good resource to learn more, I strongly recommend any homeowner with a pool go there and do some learning.

Unless you have a way to drip feed chlorine into your pool it absolutely will not have the same chlorine level, unless you are running your sag incorrectly.

Automatic chlorine dispensers are fairly inexpensive (and certainly cheaper than a chlorine generator). There's very little reason to manually add chlorine yourself unless you're SLAMing the pool (shock level and maintain, if you're unfamiliar with TFP).

This is why you add cyanuric acid to the pool when you're setting it up. The sun can destroy an entire pool's chlorine in a few hours, but CYA will help slow that process down significantly, so that you can keep up with a chlorine generator or chlorine dispenser.

Afaik, cya also lowers chlorine ability to disinfect. So it is balancing act. And since cya does not break down, one have to be careful to not overdo tablets and such. I switched to liquid chlorine for that reason

and then liquid chlorine is impossible to find and doubled in price, so I ended up with salt water.

30% muriatic acid? They stock it in gallons around here.

Liquid chlorine is another name for sodium hypochlorite, aka bleach. We tend to refer to it as liquid chlorine when buying it for pools and it is usually stronger than anything you'd buy in the household aisle of the supermarket.

Muriatic acid (aka hydrochloric acid) is a totally different chemical. That will reduce pH in the pool, it is not used as a disinfectant. I personally recommend getting something weaker than 31.45% however, if you're not etching concrete.

I thought I remembered reading something that some amount can be converted into chloramines and that those don't break down quickly.

Chloramines are used to disinfect residential water supplies. I believe if you mix chlorine and ammonia, you get cyanogen chloride, which is toxic.

You would need nuclear chlorine :). Neither chlorine, water, nor ammonia contain carbon, so they can’t react to form anything containing carbon.

Chlorine reacts with ammonia to form monochloramine, which is fairly innocuous. Monochloramine reacts with more chlorine to form dichloramine and nitrogen trichloride, which are stinky and potentially dangerous.

It seems NaOCl is capable of forming various products when reacting with other chemicals common to the home environment: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00573

Whether such products rise to a level of concern is another story.

This jumped out at me too. If it’s very reactive (and it is) then it can’t possibly be that long-lived.

Yes, it's a very silly statement. That said, the chlorine that you breathe in when the bleach that you cleaned your bathtub with evaporates can't be good for you. Worse if you spray the stuff (and how we all made fun of Trump and his nebulized hydrogen peroxide).

Yeah. A lot of household chemicals or the reaction products are dangerous to inhale, but not many people seem to care to open the windows for ventilation.

When bleach evaporates, does chlorine come off? Or just water?

Chlorine absolutely gets in the air, can’t you smell it?

Bleach should be applied with ventilation in mind.

I thought that smell was chloramines, rather than chlorine itself?

I was responding to someone who appeared to be asking if any chlorine made it in to the air regardless of in which compound.

That is not what I asked.

I smell something, sure. But I don’t believe it’s chlorine gas.

In the 90s in Sweden (possibly other countries as well) there was a campaign to get people to stop using bleach (i.e. sodium hypochlorite). However, I have not been able to find any sources that could prove that use of bleach in the home would contribute to any environmental damage.

A campaign from who? Im also a swede so I grew up with the "DRINK MILK OR UR GONNA DIE!!" campaigns from the "neutral" milk lobby.

Is that on the ground floor of the neutral milk hotel?

no, it's in the aeroplane over the sea

I’m afraid I don’t have any sources at hand, but I believe Naturskyddsföreningen were involved (The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation).

aah yes I may remmber... I think they pushed for using såpa instead :D

They sure did! Såpa isn’t bad, but it’s not as effective as bleach.

neutral milk does not sounds like a tasty beverage.

I thought bleach and alcohol were thought to not create pressure for resistance because of their nature.

It is interesting they talk about benzalkonium chloride, that stuff absolutely destroys my hands.

When the FDA shut down triclosan all the soaps for paranoid people switched to Benzalklonium Chloride. That stuff absolutely destroy my skin. No matter what anyone complains about they won't stop putting it in all the bathroom soap dispensers in our office. I can go in with my skin fine, if I wash my hands 3x in a day they are almost bleeding by the end of the day.

Also interesting Benzalkloium Chloride last time I looked was in limbo with the FDA, they couldn't decide whether to officially approve it or ban it. They know it causes contact dermatitis. It is currently in a state where the manufacturers are preparing evidence to get it approved but yet it is allowed to be on the market.

I don't think there's a way of killing microbiota that creates no pressure for resistance, that's just evolution.

Of course some adaptations are more likely than others, but from a pedantic point of view "use sparingly" is all we have.

I think in this case it destroys the cell walls, so they’d have to completely evolve how cells work in order to evolve. Thus by definition, if they evolved to survive these substances, they’d be an entirely different organism.

anything evolving in any way at all makes it a different organism. evolution is the word for organisms changing at the population level.

I don’t think you understand. Like it would have to evolve into an entirely different class of life, it would no longer be “bacteria” thus “bacteria” can never become resistant to it because to become resistant means that it is no longer “bacteria”

You can't outgrow your lineage in evolution. We're monkeys. KFC is made of dinosaurs. Anything descended from bacteria would still be bacteria.

They would change taxonomy to archea (see MatrixMan’s comment) thus no longer being bacteria.

These are all human issues, the “archea-bacteria” wouldn’t care what we called it, but fun to think about.

> Like it would have to evolve into an entirely different class of life

what do you know what it would have to do? sure, bleach dissolves bacteria cell walls, so for a change to make bleach coming into contact with cell walls not dissolve them would make the cell walls not belong to a bacterium, but what if the bleach that you apply to a surface to kill bacteria is prevented from making contact with the cell wall of a bacterium through some unforeseeable adaptation of that bacterium? now it's resistant to bleach but still a bacteria, and now it's out-reproducing other bacteria.

what adaptation would cause that? no one could say, it's _unforeseeable_.

the actual situation of interest isn't bleach coming in contact with bacteria, it's humans trying to disinfect surfaces by applying bleach.

> they’d be an entirely different organism.

Yeah, they'd be archaea instead of bacteria, which is a huge taxonomic leap, but they'd probably make you just as sick as before.

The naming hierarchies of taxonomy are somewhat justified within eukarya because we have family trees, but when you only have one parent and get your genetic diversity via horizontal gene transfer with your peers, taxonomy is just the words of silly humans.

I wouldn't be surprised if mutations happen that take populations across that boundary all the time. It happened at least once, what are the odds of it happening only once?

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New-cell-wall technology aside, I think there are other reasons to avoid frequently creating unnecessary sterile zones. At those zones' boundaries you're creating situations that favor rapid recolonization, neighbors-be-damned, potentially at the expense of equilibria-seeking behavior. Fewer Ghandis more Ghengis Khans.

There's a great radio-lab podcast (titled Argentine Invasion) which describes how conditions like these (regarding a floodplain, in this case) lead to the evolution of an especially ruthless species of ant. It seems likely to me that you'd see the same thing in bacteria populations that are frequently partially obliterated.

One approach is just to starve it of resources such as food or water.

That would promote spore formation in spore-forming bacteria. And spores are more resistant to damage than active bacteria. And spores can stay viable for years.

Fun fact, if you have spores you can create the conditions for them to become active for 24 hours or so. Then you can use a sanitizing method that's less intense. This is sometimes used in mushroom cultivation.

Yes, but if it is something extremely devastating, it might take millions of years of consistent use. Maybe e coli can figure out how to live in an autoclave after a million years, but humans will probably stop using autoclaves before then.

Depending on the temperature, prions can survive at the lower ranges. 2.5% bleach solution will denatured them though.

Prions are not living and do not evolve.

Well, it seems that you can have new prion diseases emerge. Not technically evolution since it's not reproduction, but still a similar theory where new proteins or folds could create more resilient structures. Even for true evolution you're looking at variations in sequences leading to both better and worse states.

The point is, not all autoclaves destroy everything today.

For microbes bleach is the equivalent of a cluster bomb. If you know it's coming you can evolve to decrease the odds of it killing you, but if you don't know it's coming there's nothing you can do.

One thing some bacteria can do is create spores. These are a main reason various disinfectants, including dilute bleach mixtures, say they kill 99.999% of germs, and not 100%. Spores are highly, though not totally, resistant to damage. They can even survive autoclaving at standard autoclave temperatures and pressures. But making spores is the equivalent of sticking baby Superman in a pod and sending him to Earth. Spores are the next generation, the adult generation still dies.

There are apparently better chlorine disinfectants than bleach which show good activity against spores: https://www.cdc.gov/infectioncontrol/guidelines/disinfection...

> Alternative compounds that release chlorine and are used in the health-care setting include demand-release chlorine dioxide, sodium dichloroisocyanurate, and chloramine-T. The advantage of these compounds over the hypochlorites is that they retain chlorine longer and so exert a more prolonged bactericidal effect.

> In vitro suspension tests showed that solutions containing about 140 ppm chlorine dioxide achieved a reduction factor exceeding 10^6 of S. aureus in 1 minute and of Bacillus atrophaeus spores in 2.5 minutes in the presence of 3 g/L bovine albumin. The potential for damaging equipment requires consideration because long-term use can damage the outer plastic coat of the insertion tube. In another study, chlorine dioxide solutions at either 600 ppm or 30 ppm killed Mycobacterium avium-intracellulare within 60 seconds after contact but contamination by organic material significantly affected the microbicidal properties.

> One thing some bacteria can do is create spores.

Spores and biofilms. Biofilms not only protect against antibiotics but also bleach. Some of them repel water better than Teflon. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1011033108 "The biofilm surface remains nonwetting against up to 80% ethanol as well as other organic solvents and commercial biocides across a large and clinically important concentration range."

> I don't think there's a way of killing microbiota that creates no pressure for resistance, that's just evolution.

In order for evolution to function[1], there needs to be differential survival. That is to say, some variants of bacteria must survive at greater or lesser rates than other variants.

For something as strong as bleach, given sufficient concentration and working time, it's not clear to me that that effect exists. My understanding is that it's so powerful and it's means of action is so robust that is just kills everything equally.

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1. Yes, technically evolution never stops and always functions. I guess a more precise way to word that is: in order for there to be an observable evolutionary effect.

yes, but the difference between having your biological processes disrupted and being smashed with a rock are pretty significant, and the evolutionary responses are quite different.

"I thought bleach and alcohol were thought to not create pressure for resistance because of their nature."

Agreed, and I missed if this article stated otherwise. Also we have been adding chlorine (the active ingredient in bleach) to our water supply for over 100 years ago and that experiment hasn't produced resistant microbes AFAIK.

The article is obviously not proposing a strong suggestion. It even seems to create a case against bleach and alcohol which are least risky and probably very cheap.

You can bring in your own soap, either in a dispenser that you keep at your desk and take to the bathroom whenever you need it, or use a travel-sized bottle that you can keep in a pocket.

Whenever anyone says "you can just," they're probably being unreasonable and not understanding the problem.

I wouldn't tell someone to bring their own soap unless they're travelling to a 3rd world country. It's quite reasonable to expect basic hygiene products to not destroy your hands.

> No matter what anyone complains about they won't stop putting it in all the bathroom soap dispensers in our office.

Sounds like someone in HR just is ignoring the requests. Someone should call OSHA.

I take my own soap when I travel for work in western europe because you cannot rely on these crappy airbnbs my boss rents to have any when you get there.

I've done it or I wouldn't have recommended it.

You'd hate my workplace. The water there is unspeakably foul (I'm sure it's dangerous to drink), so I bring in jugs of my own.

> Whenever anyone says "you can just," they're probably being unreasonable and not understanding the problem.

Or they're offering a solution that they don't view as being overly difficult.

I think they will create pressure but having chlorine rip apart your cell membrane seems different enough from disrupting pathways (or something else like an antibiotic does) that it seems as though it would be considerably harder to evolve against.

There are things like microbial cysts that are already protective in these cases but the tradeoffs for the organize are pretty large to adopt something like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_cyst

I've been known to carry a small bottle of Dr Bronner's for this reason. Also, the bleaching agents in a lot of commercial paper towels also chew up my hands. I'll carry a few handkerchiefs in the winter too.

> Also, the bleaching agents in a lot of commercial paper towels also chew up my hands.

Are you saying if you wet a commercial paper towel with plain water and drop it on some cloth it will bleach the fabric? Why would the bleaching agents still be active any more than with printer paper or toilet paper? Wouldn't these be a hazard if someone wiped ammonia with them?

Yeah I'm confused about that too. Not to mention most commercial paper towels are the brown unbleached kind. Meanwhile toilet paper I've never seen unbleached...

But there is something I've also always found very mildly irritating specifically about unbleached brown paper towels, as well as uncoated corrugated cardboard. Just kind of like a micro-scratchiness.

I'm not a pulp engineer, so odds are I said the wrong chemical class. Maybe it's a detergent/surfactant? I'm not sure.

"I thought bleach and alcohol were thought to not create pressure for resistance because of their nature."

I think the most famous example is that bleach (at least at normal cleaning concentrations) doesn't kill MRSA. In theory this would give it an advantage.

Where did you get that information?

"List H: Registered Antimicrobial Products with Label Claims Against Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and/or Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecalis/faecium (VRE)"

"5813-50 Sodium Hypochlorite Ultra Clorox Brand Regular Bleach Clorox co."

* https://www.epa.gov/pesticide-registration/list-h-registered...

I'm having trouble seeing the concentration for that product. I assume that's full strength 5-7%. If you look at others on that list, you'll see one at 2% sodium hypochlorite rhat requires a contact time of 5 minutes. Most disinfecting products have less than 5% bleach or are not applied for 5 minutes before removal.

Longer kill time is still killing. MRSA is not any more resistant to bleach than other pathogens.

How many people do you know actually leave a product on a surface for 5+ minutes? If you didn't use it properly, then you didn't actually kill it.

P1: Water doesn't make hot tea when combined with tea leaves.

P2: Yes it does, see <points to directions on how to make tea>

P1: Most people don't bother waiting until the water boils, they just pour it on from the faucet.

What a terrible analogy. If you want to make it analogous to what I'm saying, then your third line would have to be true, and that doesn't make sense for the example you chose.

My point was that just because people do it improperly doesn't mean it doesn't work -- and it was a great analogy.

And my point was that the major issue with the MRSA outbreaks 15 years ago or so were because people weren't using them correctly. They even started looking into new types of sanitizers because they knew the people using them were using them incorrectly. So sure, it theory it can, but in practice it generally didn't. Hence the part of my initial comment about at least not at typical concentrations etc.

Your claim was that bleach doesn't kill MRSA at normal cleaning concentrations. It clearly does because bleach is rated to kill MRSA by the EPA. You are trying to weasel out of it by claiming that people aren't using it correctly, but that doesn't make it not kill MRSA.

People who refuse to concede gracefully are insufferable.

C. difficile spores or norovirus particles would be better examples, imo

There’s just no way that’s true. Bleach rips the electrons right off. MRSA isn’t going to develop immunity to that.

There's concerns for resistance in some non-bleach compounds, especially chlorhexidine.

Bleach though remains pretty much microbial napalm, with some exceptions (prions, norovirus & C. difficile spores at the dilutions a lot of people use).

By far the bigger risk for bleach, IMO, is chemical exposure hazards.

it's easy to accidentally create chlorine gas (this will easily and painfully kill people) and if anyone read the article that's exactly what the concern is here with bleach.

> No matter what anyone complains about they won't stop putting it in all the bathroom soap dispensers in our office.

Call OSHA, or at least threaten to do so.

I would recommend against threatening to call OSHA. If you're going to do it, just do it (and be sure they keep you anonymous).

Retaliation is a thing.

> Retaliation is a thing.

Over soap?

Over calling OSHA (or, worse, threatening to call them). OSHA is no joke, and employers strongly dislike drawing their attention. Some companies react with the corporate interpretation of "snitches get stitches".

So my advice is that you don't point the gun at your employer in an attempt to coerce them into action. If OSHA intervention is necessary, just call them.

I am grateful you mentioned this. I recently got frustrated wondering why my hands seem to dry, crack, and bleed so much when I stay over at a certain household. It really makes a lot of other things difficult for days when that happens. I believe they buy antibacterial hand soap, and their water makes it hard to rinse off completely. I will now make sure to bring my own when I visit.

I agree with the risks stated in the article but I would add that people on well water should still use bleach and other strong chemicals in their bathroom from time to time. Well water does not contain Chlorine bleach and there are a number of bacteria that can grow out of control in a bathroom when Chlorine is not present in the water. Some feed off the fats in soap scum, commonly on the bottom of the shower curtain. A home I bought came with this little gift and I've had to cycle through bleach, Lysol and high powered UVC lamps to get rid of it. And UVC lamps come with the risk of converting O2 to O3 Ozone which requires good ventilation.

Liquid Chlorine worked the best in my use case. Bought a house in Florida with no bathroom exhaust fan. Fought tooth and nail to keep it at bay. Squeegeeing the walls, apply after shower mildew/mold inhibitor. Nothing worked.

Liquid Chlorine did. Open bathroom window, placed a fan in front of it and sprayed down the entire shower heavily. Yes the smell I was powerful, I wore a respirator. It's been over a year and we haven't had it come back at all. We still squeegee and apply mildew/mold inhibitor and we now have a very high powered exhaust vent in the master bathroom.

I try not to spray bleach when I can avoid it -- wiping or pouring keeps more of the bleach on the surface instead of floating around in the air.

Makes complete sense. Less to breathe also. Can't believe I didn't think of that. Thanks!

Similar situation, I have a bathroom with an exhaust fan but no openable windows. Besides the squeegee religion, I have a circulation fan on a timer that I let run for a couple hours to dry things out.

That is the one thing I wish it had was a timer. Was thinking about replacing the flip switch with a turn knob style timer.

Consider cleaning with Pine-Sol too. It’s a mold/mildew inhibitor by its nature.

Never thought of that. We'll definitely try it. Thanks!

I added a chlorine injection pump to my well that adds a little bit whenever the main pump runs. Water quality very much improved.

Last time I was in a thread with homesteaders doing sketchy things with water, one of the voices of reason invoked Legionaire's Disease.

Legionaire's disease being a rather nasty bacterial pneumonia, grows in water and needs to be aerosolized to get into the lungs. Like might happen when using a low-flow showerhead.

I've heard some horror stories as well. There are lab tests one can send off their water to test for literally hundreds of metals, toxins, pathogens and more. Most towns will also do limited testing. There are also bacteria test kits on Amazon but they only test for a few things.

My well tested clean but I still intend to shock it with chlorine. The bummer is that this is such an old well they did not make it easy to shock it without pulling the pump but I am going to replace the pump anyway because I think it was installed in the 80's.

Correct me if I'm wrong but don't you also want to retest after a flooding event (even if your well head is never submerged)?

Absolutely. AFAIK there have been no floods here. I get snow but the underground well room is covered with a heavy concrete cover. My home is much higher than the fields around me. That said I have no idea if there are any volcanic passages that would allow unfiltered ground water to reach the well. The mineral and bacterial tests would suggest that is not occurring.

This strikes me as more of a scare piece than useful. Certainly overuse of cleaning agents is a problem. But that sounds like more of a problem with education or a mental issue than a problem with the cleaning agents, per se.

I used to swim all the time in chlorinated pools as a kid. The only consequences were hair getting bleached to an greenish tint, and irritated eyes.

Sodium and chloride are the constituents of plain 'ol salt. You body deals with it well. Your stomach acid of hydrochloric acid, and it doesn't seem to be an issue, either.

I'm not worried about bleach at all, as long as it's used with common sense. So don't go overboard. Dont drink it. Don't take a both in concented bleach. I'm sure you'll be fine.

I'm sure that there are exceptions, like maybe the fumes are too much for someone with asthma or whatever. There used to be problems with dioxins that were the redult of bleaching agents. But, again, if people exercise common sense, then I'm sure that society will muddle along.

> Sodium and chloride are the constituents of plain 'ol salt. You body deals with it well.

Sure, you can make any substance sound innocuous or harmful by reducing it to its elemental constituents and then comparing them to other substances. The structure and form make the poison (along with the dose).

I could tell you that benzene is "just" carbon and hydrogen, and your body deals with those well. Except benzene is extremely carcinogenic. Unlike, for contrast, toluene, which has a very similar chemical formula but is not carcinogenic, due to a different structure.

Heck, your body "deals with" oxygen well. If you're referring to diatomic oxygen, that is - O₂. Your body does not like O₃, even though that's also "just" oxygen.

Furthermore, you're conflating chloride with chlorine. Chloride is a single chlorine anion joined in an ionic bond (or dissociated aqueous, more commonly). Bleach contains a chlorite anion - the entire anion is negative, but chlorine is itself covalently bonded to another nonmetal (oxygen). The properties of specific nonmetals as part of a larger compound are completely different from the properties of those nonmetals in isolated ions.

Both have elemental chlorine in them, but they're quite different chemically.

The tone of your response is, like the original article, more of a scare piece. And I'm not trying to make bleach "sound innocuous". Bleach, when used with common sense and whatever guidelines that apply, is actually innocuous. It's just a fact that some substances are actually innocuous.

Bleach has been used for cleaning and disinfecting for a very long time... people have used it daily for years on end in their jobs as dishwashers or whatever. If it was such a problem then people would have noticed the higher cancer rates, or whatever bleach-related diseases that actually occurr. The fact is that people in the US have had small amounts of bleach in their drinking water and it hasn't been an issue. People clean with bleach every day. It's used in laundry and all sorts of other things.

As a kid I swam in some over-bleached pools and it didn't hurt me or any of my friends. The same thing happened in swimming pools across the nation. I'm sure that we swallowed some of it as we swam, too. It wasn't a big deal then. It's not a big deal now.

I'm not a member of a multinational bleach consortium trying to trick you into using bleach against your better interests. If you don't want to use it then go ahead and stop.

The article talks about problems with bleach if you're a "professional cleaner". Ok, fine. Maybe pro-cleaners should have better ventillation sometimes, or respirators, or something else. Maybe they are using a very strong bleach and that's the problem. Maybe it depends on what they are cleaning and there is some reaction that causes problems. All are worth taking precautions against. But a regular person who occasionally uses bleach to sanitize dishes or clean a bathroom or whiten laundry? I just don't believe there is any hazard worth worrying about.

> As a kid I swam in some over-bleached pools

Fun fact -- public pools are typically under-bleached, not over. That's why they smell so bad. The strong smell is coming from the chloramines generated when chlorine neutralizes organics, like pee. If they were able to maintain better chlorine levels they'd actually smell better. That's difficult though with the sheer number of children mistreating the water at a typical public pool.

A well maintained home swimming pool should have a nearly undetectable amount of chlorine odor to the water. Hot tubs are a little more difficult because they have a small version of the same bather load problem a public pool has.

> when used with common sense

I think this is the reason this piece and more cautious advices ("scare mongering") are delivered. What is common sense in this case ? You seem gt have a good sense of what's innocuous volumes and not going overboard. Does your neighbor share that sense ? (is it "common" ?). Do the people 20 blocks down your house share that sense ?

I'd argue for better or worse, very few things still stay "common" at a large enough scale without repeating the message often enough.

If you had friends with asthma, the pool was something they had to do in small doses. The lung irritation doesn't affect most people that much, but it also depends on how many people are peeing in the pool.

If you ever have to move into a cabin in the American Southwest that's been a mouse and rodent playground, saturating it with a solution of 10% chlorine bleach in water is not a bad idea (hantavirus is the general issue in that case). You will want to rinse with a lot of water to get residue out, though.

However, such scorched-earth tactics are a bad idea on a regular basis, just use simple non-toxic cleaning agents like sodium percarbonate aka 'chlorine-free oxygen bleach', sodium citrate (basically citric acid + sodium bicarbonate cooked together in solution), and simple soap (vegetable oil + lye). The latter two are not hard to make yourself if you want to, just find a reliable recipe and instruction set online (gloves and eye protection recommended).

Do you mean .5% chlorine bleach? The stuff they sell in the store is 5-7%.

I've heard a one-time ozone generator cleaning is also good for this

> and simple soap

People really underestimate the antimicrobial properties of just plain old soap. Soap is bad news to a lot of common microbes, and kills them dead.

Some bacteria live, feed and thrive off the fats in soap if your water does not already contain chlorine. I had to fight that in a home I bought with bleach, Lysol and powerful UVC lights. This applies to people with well water as there is no added chlorine.

After all the clickbait, here's the EPA's Safer Ingredients List for antibacterials.[1]

* Chitosan

* Citric acid, anhydrous

* Ethanol

* Hydrogen peroxide

* Isopropanol

* L-Lactic acid

* Peracetic acid

* Sodium bisulfate

Citric acid cleaners are widely available and cheap. They work as as degreasers, and they are not flammable.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/saferchoice/safer-ingredients#searchList

Hydrogen peroxide has another bacterial related use. If one is unsure of the existence of pathogens they can spray peroxide on all the surfaces and just listen. The bacteria will bubble up making almost a hissing sound. Bacteria free surfaces will make no sound. I also found that peroxide will change the color of some bacteria making it easier to see with the bare human eye.

I like this article because it seems to be like a lot of people in the US equate the smell of bleach or lysol with cleanliness, which is far from the case and we now know, could be harmful. You should not let the floor dry with cleaning product, you should first rinse it with water.

Plus, there is increasing recognition that our mucosal surfaces are covered by 'helpful bacteria' and when you get rid of them the pathogenic bacteria are in more direct contact with your epithelium.

I don't see why a similar mechanism would not exist for inanimate surfaces - maybe having a thin coating of 'good dust' is better than letting a pathogen stick directly to the tiles?

In a few years maybe cleaning products will come with a post-cleaning/pre-biotic solution which includes 'good bacteria' or 'good fungi' to form a new barrier on your clean home surfaces.

Bleach wasn’t commonly used for bathroom cleaning in the US ore-covid? It’s quite common in Europe and much of the rest of the world…

Either bleach or some other powerful cleaner was.

Quite often you hear about some some younger adult working at a low paying job using bleach to clean, and they decide to mix some other cleaner in because it's not working well enough, and there is a reaction that hospitalized them or kills them.

Bleach + ammonia? Chloramine. Bad. Bleach + peroxide? Exothermic reaction that produces oxygen. Bad. Bleach + an acid like vinegar? Chlorine gas. Bad. Bleach + alcohol? Chloroform. Bad.

In short, that chlorine atom really wants to be somewhere else, and nearly anything, even water, will break the bond. So now there's chlorine ions floating around, and chlorine has the 2nd highest electronegativity after fluorine. It's so reactive it will even form compounds with many of the noble gases.

I've worked in a few cleaning jobs as a student in the UK and I've always had to a have a mini induction on how to use cleaning fluids, which is v basic - don't mix certain types of cleaning fluids

I'm in the US, and myself and most people I know well enough to know this about them have been using bleach for bathroom cleaning for my entire life.

I was raised using primarily bathroom cleaners like scrubbing bubbles and 409. Both of which are QATs instead of bleach.

As an adult I've experimented with using bleach for cleaning, and prefer it most of the time, it's just better.

Scrubbing Bubbles contains microplastic abrasives.

Most of the stuff in the bathroom cleaning aisle has a "with bleach" version

https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/3189aa67-fa2c-4ad1-ae01-7b6...

Yes, it was always common for cleaning in the US.

It absolutely was and is. The "potential to produce toxic gases" thing the article mentions is very well known, though the usual advice to avoid it (never mix two different cleaners) was briefly a little more difficult to practice due to shortages.

Honestly I've known about the ammonia thing since college or right after, but I just learned about vinegar and bleach a year ago. If you put vinegar in your laundry you probably shouldn't use the bleach dispenser to do it.

I think it was pretty common.

What wasn't common is they many people starting using lots of bleach or bleach containing products all over the place due to covid being though to be spread via fromites in the early days/months of the pandemic.

I worked in a restaurant kitchen in 2008. Every food station had to prepare a sani-bucket with about a teaspoon of bleach in a gallon of water. We used those to wipe down our food stations between preparations. I believe they’re required by US health code law.

The dish washing sink also had 3 basins. Wash, rinse and sanitize. The third had water and a small amount of bleach. Again, required by restaurant health code law.

(I realize after writing this comment you specified bathroom cleaning, but these stories still stand. Food prep environments are held to a higher standard than bathrooms.)

Ammonia is a common cleaner as well in parts of the world as well.

.. since I just used some dilute bleach to de-stink a kitchen sponge (yes, I will buy some more sponges next time I think of it):

You do have to be careful. I soaked the sponge in several changes of water, soapy and clean. But come on! Bleach is a mainstay. Just don't overuse it.

> Calls to poison control centers about cleaning chemicals also increased during the pandemic, primarily for accidental or intentional ingestion.

I seem to recall a prominent American recommending the ingestion of bleach as a treatment for Coronavirus.

Man Dies, Woman Hospitalized After Taking Form Of Chloroquine To Prevent COVID-19 https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

In this case, chloroquine phosphate, a common antimalarial, but also found in tablet form to treat fish tanks. The FDA even put out a statement about it. https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/product-safety-informa...

Is there a transcript of that? The exact sentence please.

https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/re...

He doesn't literally say "inject bleach" [EDIT: and also doesn't say: "ingest bleach"]. What transpires is this—

Acting DHS undersecretary Bryan:

> We’re also testing disinfectants readily available. We’ve tested bleach, we’ve tested isopropyl alcohol on the virus, specifically in saliva or in respiratory fluids. And I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes; isopropyl alcohol will kill the virus in 30 seconds, and that’s with no manipulation, no rubbing — just spraying it on and letting it go. You rub it and it goes away even faster. We’re also looking at other disinfectants, specifically looking at the COVID-19 virus in saliva.

(and also some stuff about UV light killing Covid)

Then, slightly later:

> THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. So I asked Bill [Undersecretary Bryan] a question that probably some of you are thinking of, if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that too. It sounds interesting.

> ACTING UNDER SECRETARY BRYAN: We’ll get to the right folks who could.

> THE PRESIDENT: Right. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you’re going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.

Then a question about it:

> Q But I — just, can I ask about — the President mentioned the idea of cleaners, like bleach and isopropyl alcohol you mentioned. There’s no scenario that that could be injected into a person, is there? I mean —

> ACTING UNDER SECRETARY BRYAN: No, I’m here to talk about the findings that we had in the study. We won’t do that within that lab and our lab. So —

> THE PRESIDENT: It wouldn’t be through injection. We’re talking about through almost a cleaning, sterilization of an area. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t work. But it certainly has a big effect if it’s on a stationary object.

So, I mean... he kinda does, in a completely dumbshit way, suggest we should explore injecting bleach (or maybe isopropyl alcohol? It's always hard to tell WTF the guy's talking about) but then walks it back when actually questioned on it, but then finished by leaving open the idea of exploring... something? "Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't"—maybe fucking what works? Impossible to know. "We're talking about through almost a cleaning" well, yeah, we know that works for, you know, not the inside of people, so... did you or did you not mean trying to get bleach or isopropyl alcohol inside people? Because the first statement clearly meant that, but then you said, not, but now "maybe it works", but what maybe works? And now my head hurts. "Or almost a cleaning". I mean. What?

Anywho, IIRC from watching this when it happened, he does not seem to be making a joke with the initial comment about using tanning beds or household cleaning product injections to fight covid, or whatever the shit he had in mind when he said that craziness.

[EDIT] Though, to be clear, he does not say people ought to go inject or drink bleach. He just suggests he's going to have government scientists look into the idea, which is hilariously stupid but also not as bad as it's sometimes made out to be.

He's riffing on a study that was released just before that talk, in which blood was passed through a machine that shone UV light into it to kill infectious material. (Similar in spirit to dialysis in terms of blood going out of the body, being treated, then put back in.) Of course, that statement of "this new tech is interesting" got memetically mutated into "Trump wants people to inject bleach".

Well, he later claimed he'd said something incredibly stupid on purpose to troll reporters. Didn't come off that way in the briefing, but... I mean, seems fair to judge the statements as incredibly stupid when our options are to judge them at face value or to believe him when he tells us they were dumb (on purpose). I don't see a lot of room for giving him the benefit of the doubt that he had something smart in mind and just didn't communicate clearly, under those circumstances.

We're left with three options, basically, and the one that allows his statements to be not-dumb requires that we believe he told a childish "nuh uh, I meant to say a dumb thing!" lie (in this version, the lie is that it was dumb on purpose, because we're asserting it was not dumb at all) later. The other options are that he said something dumb then lied that he did it on purpose (from his pattern of behavior, I judge this far and away the most likely), or that he said something dumb but told the truth that he did it on purpose (which is, like... still not what the kids would call a great look, right?)

rent free

Serious question, what do people clean their bathroom with then…I used to never use bleach but it’s the most effective thing to clean bath and toilets.

Yes, bleach is great when you dilute it properly, ventilate, wear gloves, and don't mix it with other chemicals, thanks article!

What the New York Times thinks will happen: Enhanced labeling and regulation of dangerous chemicals in household cleaners leads to a safer world for all.

What will actually happen: Common chemicals like bleach, borax, vinegar, and ammonia will be banned from direct sale to consumers; you'll be forced to buy whatever brand name from one of two major manufacturers, with as little insight into its composition and dangers as you have today. A decade from now they'll run an exposé about the multi-generational environmental impact of some exotic chemical these products used. Lawyers get paid $millions in a class action. You get lung cancer and a coupon for $5.95. Cleaning products still cost $10 per quart.

> What the New York Times thinks will happen: Enhanced labeling and regulation of dangerous chemicals in household cleaners leads to a safer world for all.

> What will actually happen: Common chemicals like bleach, borax, vinegar, and ammonia will be banned from direct sale to consumers;

This is a lifestyle piece providing basic safety information for common household goods. It's quite a stretch to imply any intention of a regulatory outcome for that, let alone one that somehow bans common cooking ingredients.

Not to mention that the only mention of vinegar is as an aside, a (correct) warning that two common cleaning materials should not be used simultaneously.

Glad I'm not the only one who deciphers similar takes from these latent articles

"10 a quart? Those are rookie numbers! " - Ecolab

I've purchased a little water electrolyzer from Amazon to use as a bleach alternative, and it seems to work quite well. I wonder why this isn't more popular. A little less convenient (takes a little time to make, shelf life of days) and more upfront cost perhaps?

As I understand it, that's just a way to create bleach, and bleach itself isn't particularly expensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrochlorination

it does seem significantly less noxious that the typical bleach I’ve used, but maybe it’s just about the dilution level

Sorry, but saying hydrogen peroxide is safer than bleach and therefore you should swap them is leaving out a massive caveat.

It is still corrosive and an irritant. Yes, the decomposition products are much less of a problem, but thats kinda less of the point.

What about iodine based sanitizers? I see those were missing from the list. Obviously those aren't great on things that can stain. I understand the risk with those is that some people are sensitive to iodine.

I see this time and again and people need to know that bleach is not a cleaner. It is a disinfectant at most and an oxidizer that can turn some things white but, no, it does no cleaning of its own.

Any reason to not just give things a quick wipe down with isopropyl alcohol, besides flammability?

author gives worse-than-real arguments for bleach causing COPD while grouping it with actual disinfectants that leave nasty residue which grows resistant bacteria.

Low quality, low science article.

I don't use disinfectants - not because I fear the chemicals - but because I believe that your immune system needs to be exposed to germs. It's necessary to keep it fit IMO.

In such a vague sense, "exposed to germs", it doesn't matter if you use disinfectants or not - you'll encounter plenty in your daily life.

The purpose of disinfectants is to target surfaces that harbor massive populations of them.

Everyday respiratory and doorknob germs? Sure, maybe.

But salmonella from raw chicken? Or diseases spread via feces? I don't think so. That's not keeping you fit, it's just a risk of making you seriously sick for no good reason.

People don't generally wipe down their whole house. But disinfecting kitchen prep surfaces and your toilet bowl, is basic hygiene/safety.

Don't worry, you'll still be getting more than enough germs from the rest of the world.

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