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The Dangers of Anti-Bacterial Dish Soap

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Many municipalities have hygiene regulations for day cares, nursery schools, and other institutions. These usually include washing cups with dish soap, rinsing with water, and then chlorine bleach diluted in water.

At the same time anti-bacterial dish soap is becoming increasingly prevalent in grocery stores. Many people consider it a good thing as it will eliminate germs.

The trouble is that the anti-bacterial soaps are frequently ammonia based. If you mix ammonia and chlorine you create deadly chlorine gas.

Many household chemicals are incompatible; even products that you might not even consider a chemical at first thought. Liquid dish soap or even shampoo appear as innocent or innocuous soaps. I clean my sinks with Vim with Bleach before doing the dishes. Even with thorough rinsing you can smell anti-bacterial soap if you use it afterwards. In my opinion, some of the anti-bacterial soaps have a horrible smell.

A few years ago I washed some seashells in a small bathroom with the door shut. I used Pantene shampoo as the soap and threw in a little chlorine bleach to kill bacteria. Within a minute the bathroom stunk of chlorine gas and I struggled to pull open the door. It stuck from moisture. Within a couple of minutes the gas had spread throughout the apartment. Upon closer inspection of the Pantene shampoo I saw that it was ammonia based.

Products with ammonia say not to mix with chlorine bleach and vice versa. But do you really know what chemicals are in the products you use?

Be careful with common household items and if you find your institution is using anti-bacterial dish soap and chlorine bleach in a disinfecting sequence then speak out. Anti-bacterial dish soap is not better!


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Links to External Related Articles

Use Bleach with Caution (from IOWA State University)
Cleaning products can be hazardous
Using Cleaning Products Safely (from Oklahoma State University)
Severe Lung Injury After Exposure to Chloramine Gas From Household Cleaners (New England Journal of Medecine)

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A Reader's Similar Experience

I have been searching on the internet, trying to locate some articles on the use of chlorine mixed with ammonia, and have been unsuccessful.

Yesterday I walked into my daughter's daycare center. Upon entering, I immediately felt light headed and my eyes began to tear. I recognized the smell. When I asked the daycare instructor what they had been using, she advised me that the smell was bleach. I proceeded to ask her if they had added soap to it. She informed me that they had cleaned the daycare center (room) using a combination of dish soap with bleach. I explained that combining the two products causes a poisonous gas and asked them to walk all the kids outside and air out the room. While they accepted my request, I felt that they were appeasing me, not really believing my explanation of the reaction between chemicals.

My daughter attends a daycare program offered through the district. The daycare center is one classroom in a public school and I would like to provide them with any literature in this regard so that they can share with the other locations. The room is quite small, and had I not advised the instructor, who knows what the result might have been. Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate any articles on the internet regarding this subject, and I was hoping you could help to provide me with such.

Some years ago, I took a CPR/first aid class. The instructer was an employee of the fire department, the brother to a friend of mine. During this class we discussed the consequences of mixing chemicals together. It was then that I learned that mixing ammonia with bleach caused a deadly chlorine gas. Unfortunately most CPR/first aid classes do not cover this material. The class that I took was through a friend of mine, and was a little more extensive.

Any information you can provide me regarding this would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Please email us here at Pullman Kids if you have a similar experience to share or if you have any useful information we could include here.


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Last modified January 30, 2007