Triclosan
You might have seen the name triclosan on your toothpaste tube or even remember it being mentioned in adverts. It is an anti-bacterial agent made by the Swiss company Ciba-Giegy, and has been used since the seventies in a wide range of products like baby creams and bath additives, toothpaste and washing up liquids. The most inventive use I saw of it was a proposal to incorporate it into nylon. This would allow you to make antibacterial underpants thus saving real men the inconvenience of having to change them every month.
Its popularity has a lot to do with the fact that the manufacturers put together a huge amount of safety information on it. Anti-bacterials by their nature tend to be rather nasty molecules – but triclosan was presented to formulators as being the safe option.
Despite this, some of us weren’t too keen on it. It is easy in a lab to assess how well something works as an anti-bacterial, and this one works pretty well, it is much harder to get a handle on safety. Triclosan comes from the same chemical family as DDT – if you look the two molecules up on Wikipedia you will see how similar their structures are. DDT was also supposed to be safe when it came out.
But triclosan has up until recently been given a very clean bill of health, so it seemed that it was okay. Some research published recently has suggested that it can be broken down into dioxins by light under certain circumstances. The level was pretty low, too low to pose a serious health risk per se but dioxins are bad news. This was the poison used on that Ukrainian politician whose skin became pock-marked.
Adding anything toxic to the environment always seems to me to be a bad idea. The many tonnes of triclosan produced each year all end up in water courses. We don’t really know what effect they have when they get there, and being a persistent stable molecule that is easily absorbed and concentrated in animals’ fat deposits you can’t be sure that it will stay diluted. I have similar misgivings about parabens.
On balance you have to say that triclosan has very little risk associated with it, but that it isn’t risk free either. I think that its use should be restricted to licensed pharmaceutical products. It is a very useful treatment for infected skin conditions like impetigo. Let’s keep it for where we really need it and get it out of mass market products.
