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Widely Used Antibacterial Chemical May Impair Muscle Function
New submitter daleallan writes "Triclosan, which is widely used in consumer handsoaps, toothpaste, clothes, carpets and trash bags, impairs muscle function in animal studies, say researchers at UC Davis (abstract). It slows swimming in fish and reduces muscle strength in mice. It may even impair the ability of heart muscle cells to contract. The chemical is in everyone's home and pervasive in the environment, the lead researcher says. One million pounds of Triclosan is produced in the U.S. annually and it's found in waterways, fish, dolphins, human urine, blood and breast milk. The researchers say their findings 'Call for a dramatic reduction in use.' It's in my Colgate Total toothpaste, and in fact, preventing gingivitis is the only use that may be worthwhile, although this makes me think twice about continuing to brush with it."
This isn't the first time Triclosan has been in the news over safety concerns.
... that a substance used to harm life would harm life?
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Need to stress this, Triclosan is not the only drug found in waterways
A lot of other substances that human being are using ended up in waterways and they are having all types of side effects on ecology around us
I read an article about 10 years ago that nano-silver particles that we human are using - to kill bacteria, -somehow entered the waterways and end up killing a lot of microbial lifeforms, and the chain reaction (according to the articles that i read, can't find the links to them anymore, sorry) was worrying
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I can certainly dose any given collection of animals with nearly any given chemical in a fashion that will kill them (either quickly or slowly, depending on the particular substance.) I can also dose them with an utterly harmless dose of the most toxic and horrible poisons known to mankind and the animal will live. This applicable to everything from water or oxygen to nasty organic or radiologic stuff.
In the end, it all comes down to the dose. Was the dose these animals were given at all representative of the dosing received by a person using triclosan-based products? (Or animals absorbing triclosan in the environment?) Would have been nice if that press release had mentioned it. Since it didn't, I can guess that the dose is utterly ridiculous.
The experiments in mice were performed at 12.5mg/kg, which would be (for the average 65-kg human) a shocking 812.5mg of Triclosan. If your standard amount of handsoap and toothpaste is 2ml that's like brushing your teeth with a 1/3 solution of triclosan and swallowing it.
Like most of the research in PNAS this was not subjected to the high level of peer review expected in most scholarly journals and this paper got through without regard to its relevance and real-world significance.
At a high enough dose, caffeine causes cancer in lab animals. But not at the doses even Slashdotters consume.
12.5 mg/kg! Holy cow! This is ridiculously in excess of any conceivable dose of Triclosan you could get unless you are an utterly unprotected employee of a Triclosan-using factory.
Stop making life decisions based on limited evidence.
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For one thing, its reversible. Wears off after 60 mins in mice at the dose they were using. Hey that might even mean less free radicals which cause aging. Second, humans aren't going to notice the effects at the doses they receive, otherwise we would have seen it in factory workers that produce triclosan already. So nobody should be alarmed at least, unless maybe it impairs salmon swimming upstream to reproduce.
Your immune system needs exposure to bacteria in order to stay strong. If you are always using anti-bacterial lotions and wipes, your white bloods cells can 'forget' how to fight off infection. Some of the healthiest guys are sewer workers, they rarely take a sick day, because their immune systemsare so strong, since they are constantly fighting off bacteria.
Some of the healthiest guys are sewer workers, they rarely take a sick day, because their immune systemsare so strong, since they are constantly fighting off bacteria.
But their breath is knock down nasty and their farts are room clearing because sewage workers' internal bio flora has a larger population of anaerobic and methanogenic bacteria. Apart from that they are really nice guys.
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... is how you put a competitor out of business.
Slip a little Triclosan into their vodka?
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the M in 0.52 uM is 1 mol/L so 0.52 umol/L :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molar_concentration
You would be better off giving it a grape or an onion. Chocolate is fairly weak in killing a dog than that of cocoa itself. An onion actually causes the blood cells in a dog to "pop" which means a deader dog in a shorter time.
The industry responded today with this, saying the research distorts the real world use of triclosan based on faulty comparisons to overdosed test subjects : http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/research-on-key-antibacterial-ingredient-distorts-real-world-use-166179966.html
In context.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22885664
Urinary levels of bisphenol A, triclosan and 4-nonylphenol in a general Belgian population.
'Geometric mean concentration was determined for bisphenol A at 2.55ug/l and for triclosan at 2.70ug/l'
Now, Triclosans molar mass is around 300.
0.52uMol/l is therefore 300 times this - 150ug/l.
So, this is lots higher - 50 times - that in the general population.
(Assuming urine and blood are of similar concentration, I can find no papers on this in 2 mins)
However, 50* is not a stupid amount to exceed dosages by, especially given that it's likely that some humans will exceed the average by at least 5 times.
So chocolate makes zombie dogs, but onions kill them properly?
Indeed, I'd rather be using lotions/whatever with beneficial bacteria cultures in them than anti-bacterial stuff.
Probiotics are a main selling point of yogurt, we may as well promote the ones that help us rather than try to poison everything, period.
I think antibiotic treatments should always come paired with probiotic therapy to rebuild beneficial flora that you should not have killed.... And deaths from clostridium dificile bear this out.
--PM
Can a scientist type person please clarify this for the less-sciency of us?
uM is micromolar, not micrometer. Micrometer is um. Molarity is a a unit of concentration where 1M is one mole of a substance per liter. A mole is the number of atoms of a substance it takes for the actual weight to match the molecular weight. e.g. The molecular weight of an oxygen molecule (O2) is twice the molecular weight of oxygen(2x16=32). So one mole of O2 weighs 32g.
The actual numerical value of the mole is avogadro's number(6.02x10^23), but it's not really necessary to work with the actual number when you're doing concentration calculations like this.
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Effective against us. It likely kills people indirectly.
There is a huge, symbiotic, non-human, microbial biomass that make our lives possible.
These microbes outnumber us, in our OWN bodies. They are how we digest our food, repel destructive invaders, regulate enzyme levels - and are likely involved in our psychological disposition.
The fact is, we know almost nothing about this - just the tip of an iceberg. Science and Medicine are just getting past the primitive, binary thinking that sterile systems are healthiest. Killing ALL the bacteria in your mouth? Health complications emerge when you lose the phages that destroy actually harmful bacteria.
Poisoning this has a potential for huge, uncalculated consequences. And merely brushing your teeth with this stuff trickles a little dose of triclosan into your tract, two or three times a day.
I think that it would be interesting to study the correlation between triclosan exposure and the obesity epidemic.
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