

That’s right. Hand soap.

Your tax dollars, hard at work:




The folks at Smart Girl Politics have a petition going to oppose efforts to ban this substance without any concrete scientific findings that there is, in fact, a problem.

The environmentalists pushing this issue want the EPA and/or the FDA to ban Triclosan, but there seems to be little evidence that the substance is problematic. It’s been used in anti-bacterial soap since the 1920’s, and the last time I checked there haven’t been any health epidemics kicked off by the use of Triclosan. What’s more, the FDA reports that “Triclosan is not currently known to be hazardous to humans,” though they couch that statement in a bit of uncertainty.

Scientists, after all, never like making absolute statements. They’ll never admit that something couldn’t be true. Only that they don’t know something to be true.

Again, it’s hard to imagine that something we’ve been using since the 1920’s is suddenly harmful. Frankly, it’s all a bit reminiscent of Rachel Carson’s infamous campaign against the use of DDT. Carson insisted that DDT, then used widely as a deterrent to mosquitoes and other pests, caused cancer. But the link she made was superficial, and has never been proved. Despite that, government acted and as of 2004 DDT is banned for most uses world wide. Now Malaria death rates, which had been trending down as DDT was used to suppress the spread of the disease through insect bites, have spiked.

Obviously, companies should be prevented from using substances that are harmful to we humans either in the short term or the long term. But the government should only enact such preventions when they’re sure the substances being targeted are, in fact, harmful.

Because the repercussions of a bad decision can be terrible.


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