My ballpoint pen says it is “antimicrobial.” What does that mean in a pen?
Are there germ-killers in the ink? For what purpose?
Should I not chew on it? Or, indeed, should I make a point of doing so?
Smells to me of BS OCD germophobe pandering marketing speil…
This seems to bethe company behind it (at lease one of them)…
http://www.agion-tech.com/Technology.aspx?id=156
Don’t know enough chemistry to know whether this complete psuedoscience, or actually will help kill germs. Either way its still BS IMO. Germs are everywhere, get over it. And I personally would rather swallow a couple of germs than a bunch of silver ions in a zeolite carrier.
It usually means the plastic has an anti-bacterial additive in it, most often a silver, copper or zinc compound. Not sure how effective it is, but it’s extremely common in Japan.
It’s so if the pen is in a public place, you don’t get pen chewers sharing diseases with each other.
Pen is silly then.
There is some evidence that silver particles have a very mild antimicrobial activity, FWIW. As for the rest of this, just picture a giant rolleyes smiley right here:
In the 21st century, microbes are highly-educated denizens of our planet with a supreme knack for adaptation. Their hunger for information is outpaced only by their drive to reproduce. They are dangerous competitors for our limited resources and their ingenuity must not be underestimated. This is the beginning of a technological arms race the human species cannot afford to idly abide.
We must stop them in their infancy. You are armed with your fancy pen. Feed them bad poetry, adolescent romance, malformed Haiku and middle-school research with improper citations. Let the misinformation begin and may the best species survive.
Yeah, I searched around to see if anything much new has come up, and there isn’t much. There are lots of products now, but no real confirmation that they have a practical effect.
If this turns out to be useful, you’ll see the first real confirmation in a study on how these miracle plastics reduce infection rates in hospitals or something. And even then, it’s probably not worth buying unless you work with lots of small children or old people, and you want to avoid spreading disease around.
Until then, just wash your hands.
Thanks everyone.
But does it work, Trebek?
FWIW we ordered some “antimicrobial” pens at work and when they came, the packaging had a large yellow sticker proclaiming something to the effect of, “This product has not been proven to prevent the growth of bacteria.” We all had a good chuckle over it.
There’s a whole line of Antimicrobial office products. It’s probably got a lot to do with germophobia.
I can understand the pen on the chain at the bank that everybody touches, but a desktop calculator?
There are pens, staplers, binders, envelopes, file folders, rubber bands, glue sticks, pencils, scissors, tape guns, etc. These are made by a variety of manufacturers such as C-Line, 3M, Alliance, Acme-United, Dixon, Quality Park. It’s not just one company producing office supplies with an “antimicrobial” label on them.
I just looked at a description and it seems that the antimicrobial stuff is to protect the products and paperwork from damage, not the people handling them.
From a Smead product description: “Folders are specially treated with an antimicrobial agent to guard against growth of bacteria, odors, algae, mold, fungus and mildew. Ideal for medical environments or anywhere bacteria and mold control is critical.”