Hah!
I take an immense pleasure in learning that bacterial soap isn't any better than regular soap. Bacterial soap represents two bits of American foolishness, an obsession with germs and the conviction that you need a special item for every single thing. People won't use soap to wash their bodies instead buying expensive body lotions and face lotions and body washes and whatever, and then they don't want soap for their hands because it's not clean enough. I'm not even convinced soap is all that important. My understanding is soap just makes water wetter (I've never known what that means, exactly, but that's what I keep hearing). So it's not that it kills germs, whcih suggests that if you just put your hands in the water and rub perhaps that will clean them just as well as often as not. I'm not saying that's true, but I was right about bacterial soap.
Remember when your primary school science teacher would amaze students by mixing water and vegetable oil and letting them seperate? Oil and grease is not polar, water is. Oil on our skin tends to grabs onto dirt like it's its job, so often removing the oil removes the dirt. Soap has polar ends and non-polar ends, so it can serve as a little blanket, wraped nice and tightly around the oil particle, presenting its polar backside to the water, in which the entire little ball of soapy filth can dissolve and be washed down the drain.
ReplyDeleteAnti-bacterial soap just kills the bacteria on the way down the drain, oftentimes doing more harm than good in my opinion, as it introduces antibacterial agents which aren't guaranteed to kill everything. This can be harmful because surviving bacteria become a little stronger having survived the antibacterial agents.
How soap works:
http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/554soap.html
Why antibacterial agents can harm:
http://www.anapsid.org/tooclean.html
Wow, this is the most informative thing in my entire blog. Guess I'm going to have to believe in soap after all.
ReplyDelete