Today, the Food and Drug Administration has banned antibacterial soap, ruling there’s no scientific evidence it’s better than regular soap. But the FDA is, if anything, being generous. Antibacterial soap is, at best, ineffective and, at worst, unintentionally helping to cause exactly the problem it’s trying to prevent.
Antibacterial Soap Doesn’t Fight Bacteria
Antibacterial soap generally uses two antibiotics, triclosan and tricarban, with triclosan being the more popular. On the surface, these are fairly logical chemicals to put into a soap, as they’re commonly used by surgeons scrubbing in for procedures and shown to be effective in a hospital environment. However, there’s a key difference between doctors and your average person: Doctors scrub with triclosan for at least two minutes, and the rest of us don’t.
That means, first of all, that the triclosan is going to waste without doing anything for you. Worse, it’s turning up in products that have no need of it, from toys to garbage bags to the duvet you put on your bed. If it’s marked with “antibiotic,” it likely has triclosan in it. As a result, there’s an enormous amount of triclosan in the environment, washing down drains, floating in the air, and lingering in our bodies.
Environmentally, triclosan has been a problem. Most of the triclosan we use at home is washed down the drain, where it can cause problems with wastewater treatment and potentially damage the environment. But far more worrying is the presence of triclosan in our bodies.
Antibacterial Soap May Be Making Us Sick
One of the fundamental issues with antibacterial products is that the idea of triclosan as a common household chemical, which it more or less has become, was never tested. Until the antibacterial soap craze, triclosan was largely in hospitals, and its addition to products went largely without any challenge or, for that matter, any research. Why would it? Doctors use it, so of course it has to be effective and safe, right?
Over time, it’s been shown that those assumptions are mistaken. Triclosan has a wide-ranging effects on human health and is suspected as a culprit in a host of problems. The most obvious point of concern is antibiotic resistance. A recently published overview of antibiotic resistance found that our love of antibacterial soaps may not only reduce triclosan’s effectiveness, but increase the overall resistance to antibiotics in general. That, in of itself, is a serious problem: 23,000 people a year die from antibiotic resistant infections. It may even encourage our biomes, or the bacteria that live inside us, to reject antibiotics. But the potential health problems run much deeper.
Triclosan in your snot, for example, makes you more prone to staph infections by allowing staph to more effectively bind with proteins in your body. It’s been found as a potential cause of increased allergic sensitivity and is suspected to cause certain types of allergies as well. It may also interfere with hormones, although that’s under debate.
Antibacterial Soap Doesn’t Work
It’s worth remembering that none of this was intentional. Soap manufacturers didn’t set out to make us sick or cause environmental problems. They just wanted to make a safer product people would be more interested in buying, and thought triclosan was the way to do it. But it has, unfortunately, backfired. The scientific evidence is mounting that triclosan just should not be in household products, and hopefully the FDA ruling will get it out of our homes, and back into the hospital where it belongs, that much faster.
