Monday, November 05, 2007

The fight for germs

Ah another advert "You wouldn't let your child eat off the street, but your kitchen surface may be home to up to [lots] of germs" Well yeah, but your kitchen surface isn't normally party to chewing gum scrapings marinated in various species urine and topped off with a dusting of the finest fag ash; or if it is I doubt this advert is aimed at you.

So anyway this product kills off the germs making it safe for your kid to eat his whatever he's eating off it. Now call me strange, but you've just doused this table in germ-killer and now you're letting your kid eat some of it, out of curiosity what's that doing to them? You wouldn't let them drink a bottle of the stuff, but a regular small dose is fine?

Next how about those germs, out all of the germs on your surface there stands some small chance that one of them is immune/resistant to this stuff. So you've just wiped (no pun intended) out the competition, be fruitful and multiply little resistant germ.

I'm not saying we shouldn't be clean, it just seems to me there's a touch of obsession behind it.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Well yeah, but your kitchen surface isn't normally party to [&hellip]; or if it is I doubt this advert is aimed at you."

LMAO. This is massive! Thanks for that one…

PS. Germs become resistant to specific biological toxins. They don't become resistant to chemicals so corrosive that their cells literally disolve in the stuff. ;-)

Making an antibiotic that will kill germs without killing the patient is quite hard. Making a poison that simply obliterates all forms of life is drop-dead easy. (Neat pun!)

FlipC said...

Ta muchly, I'm glad you found it funny.

Yeah it's difficult to become resistant to something that literally dissolves you, but it can have other consequences. Then you remember that you're preparing your food on a surface you've just doused with a cell dissolving substance - yummee!

Anonymous said...

Isn't that why you're supposed to wash it afterwards? I always do, anyway… ;-)

Plus, humans are bigger than single-celled animals, and thus, I presume, have a greater capacity to tolerate toxins. (So long as they aren't the type that accumulates over time…)

BTW, I've always wondered about NaClO. The bottle of disinfectant I have at home contains "0.001% NaClO w/w". I then add a tiny dribble of this liquid to my cup, and dilute it with an entire cup-full of water. And yet, even so, after about 30 seconds the deeply stained cup is *sparkly* white.

So, like, what the hell would pure NaClO do to my cup?!??!

FlipC said...

"Isn't that why you're supposed to wash it afterwards?"

You mean you're supposed to wash it after you've just cleaned it - sheesh ;-)

Anyhoo you sure you got that percentage right I thought concentrations were around the 5% mark? Ah the good old Sainsbury's site - Thickened Bleach "Less then 5% Sodium Hypochlorite" well I suppose 0.001% is less then 5%.