Then why does the bleach in my bleach bottle smell like bleach?
My biggest worry with bleach and so-called " disinfectants" is that they destroy the normal balance of bacteria on my kitchen surfaces. As bacteria are everywhere, I suppose the different kinds of bacteria have reached some sort of equilibrium, where the numbers of the different kinds keep each other in check and the harmless bacteria will be by far the biggest majority.
Now, when I’ve desinfected my kitchen surfaces, and the bleach has dried, I have wiped out all the competition and in effect I offer the newly incoming bacteria a few square feet of empty petri-dish. What, then, is to stop a stray single salmonellagerm that lands in that petridish from multiplying itself into stomach-flu inducing numbers?
IMHO, cleaning is supposed to remove any traces of germfood, not the germs themselves. Removing all traces of food will keep the bacteria within healthy levels. Soap and elbow grease is enough for that.
I may be wrong, but that is my cleaning philosophy.
Obviously, you don’t have a bottle of bleach, you have a bottle of dead stuff. Check the label.
With apologies for the Hijack, Cite
Clearly the jury is still out, but there’s a possibility.
I agree with most of that, but a few details don’t seem to ring true.
-“So-called” disinfectants, in the US at least, really are disinfectants. The EPA standard is killing 99.9% percent of germs in the sample (despite the wiggle room, they all test out at 100%.) You’ll find an EPA number on the bottle, along with the max dilution that will still meet the spec.
-I understand your concern for a “natural balance” of microcritters on your kitchen surfaces, but how do we know that we started with a natural balance?
-When you use a “kill-em-all-and-let-God-sort-'em-out” disinfectant on your counter, the critters in the air, on your food, and on your hands do start repopulating right away, but probably in roughly the same balance you had before. Food-borne nasties come mostly from contact, not from the air, so the airborne critters get a head start.
-Soap and water is indeed very hard on germs. Not just because you removed the germ-food, but because the alkaline soap is a hostile environment for them.
-Somebody else was talking about anti-bacterial hand soaps. In handwashing tests, the a-b soaps are no more effective than ordinary soaps. Regular soap handwashing is anti-bacterial.
One thing to consider is wearing out your dishwasher. A friend of mine used to put bleach in her garbage disposal to sanitize things. It eventually started leaking everywhere and the repair guy said that the gaskets had been eaten through by the bleach. Now, to be fair, she’s a bit over the top with her ‘need for clean’, and it sounds like a few thimbles of bleach is alot less than she used, but if it is not gaining you anything on the sanitation side of the equation, it probably is (very) slowly doing unnecessary damage to your dishwasher… so why bother.
They don’t trust restaurants with two containers either. The standard manual dishwashing setup is a three-well sink - wash, rinse, sanitize just like you were doing with the scouts. Note that there’s no final rinse after the bleach.
The rule of thumb I’ve learned from health inspectors is to dunk your arm in the sanitize sink and pull it out. If you want to be fussy about it, there are test strips available. There should be a faint smell of bleach on the skin. The official requirement is usually 50-100 ppm of bleach, or one teaspoon per gallon.
So, “three thimbles” of bleach to a sink is close enough to commercial health code specs for home use, and certainly not going to harm anyone.
I also have never seen antibacterial soaps with iodine or alcohol. essel mentioned one cite about triclosan resistance, here’s another from the CDC just in case you want to check out more than one source.
When I worked at Little Caesar’s, the standard practice was a capful of bleach in the big sink of rinse water as a disinfectant. AIUI, this is a DOH-approved method. Of course, the fact that our pans were going through an oven for 10 minutes or so was another reason we didn’t hear of people getting sick from our food…
My husband the Heath Inspector said: Putting the bleach in a dishwasher at the beginning of the cycle is useless, the bleach will get washed out. In most **commercial ** dishwashers the bleach dispenses at the end of the cycle. Not enough to hurt anyone.
gotpasswords my husband has never heard of the arm in the water thing. He always used test strips(been a HI for 30 years).
Some years ago, while at work, I came upon a bottle of bleach or Clorox, can’t remember which, and it said on the bottle that it was “oderless.” So, being curious about the claim, I carefully removed the cap and stuck the bottle up to my nose inhaled.
I didn’t smell a thing.
Soooo I then inhaled again, but with less caution, and it felt like a BLOWTORCH!
There was a guy there with me as I did this little experiment. He laughed and, I, for a moment, wanted to harm him.