There's a great video from Don Pettit on the ISS where he used candy corn to demonstrate the polar / nonpolar nature of soap. He coated one end of the candy corn with a hydrophobic substance and water as his lipid stand-in. Then he demonstrated how a couple of them would just float on the lipids, but a bunch of them would bind the lipids up and make them water soluble.
It was difficult to grok on the first couple watches because water was taking the role of lipids and air was taking the role of water, but a fascinating and visceral demonstration.
This is probably the stupidest question many of you will encounter today, but:
If soap has an extraordinary ability to destroy viruses on our skin ... can eating soap give us some of those benefits for viruses that are already in our bodies?
I'm not seriously envisioning chowing down on bar soap or using liquid hand soap as a salad dressing. But are there ways to use the _properties_ of soap that make it good for killing viruses in something that can be ingested? Or do those properties only work for surface-level viruses, and we need to use other strategies to kill viruses once they're in our bodies?
i have respect for people who can ask these seemingly-dumb but valid and good-faith questions, knowing that they may be judged for it. we all have gaps in our knowledge.
True. However it can also be used by asking a question without having looked into it, ie. laziness, having others do the work instead. The tactic is then to come across as (courageously) courteous. The old preface on /. "OK, I got karma to burn [...]". Looking into it before asking for help is easier nowadays than ever before (sapere aude). With the caveat it is also easier to find misinformation and fall into such a cultish trap set up by people thousands of miles away, frolicking around in hostile jurisdictions (IRA comes to mind). I guess the cynicism is high in my post; if we lighten up and assume no harm Saul Goodman.
Your question is important. Sapophagia exists. People do this. It can give you gastrointestinal symptoms. Could be associated with nutritional deficiencies. Might kill you.
> Among symptomatic patients (n = 276), one patient died from aspiration pneumonia and one patient died from a cardiogenic shock following oropharyngeal oedema, vomiting, cough and bronchial obstruction.
I'd also like to add: don't ever ingest anything containing methanol. That group may include hand sanitizers.
I mean yes, technically soap will destroy viruses that are already in your body absolutely. It will also destroy many other cells and proteins in your body as well since soap is an indiscriminate killer. The end result is that both viruses and normal tissue will end up dying which will damage you or possibly kill you.
This doesn't sound right. Soap is considered nontoxic. We all ingest soap residue from dishes and other hygiene and I've never heard anyone concerned about it.
That's not quite right either. Soaps and detergents are not intended for internal use. The residue won't kill you (because it's incredibly diluted) but ingesting the raw product would cause problems such as nausea and vomiting.
That's why there's an entirely separate class of soap products formulated specifically for those among us who own and operate a vagina.
Soap in very small amounts is nontoxic. In larger quantities soap will absolutely cause a great deal of discomfort, vomiting or even result in chemical burns in your digestive tract. Soap poisoning is absolutely something people get concerned with, especially those who have kids who are a little too curious.
People are, in fact, concerned about it, although some studies suggest that the types of surfactants used in rinse aid are worse than the kinds used to wash dishes:
I generally try to avoid traditional soaps (saponified oils). They’re only soapy at in basic solution, and skin is naturally a bit acidic. Even for washing dishes, there are mildly unfortunate interactions — try mixing Dr. Bronner’s soap with any acidic food. You get a gooey mess that isn’t soapy. On the other hand, I suppose that traditional soap residue that anyone with normal stomach acid manages to eat will turn back into free fatty acids.
(Skin is, in general, rather more sensitive to bases than acids. Even a fairly mild base will make skin feel unpleasant and a bit slimy, whereas holding an orange slice (quite acidic) is not particularly irritating to intact skin.)
unfortunately googling shows that mixups happen every so often, sometime due to what I’d call gross or willful negligence like storing it in a re-used food container in the fridge
It's all about the concentration. Our gastro-intestinal tract is coated in mucus which will prevent small quantities of soap from actually touching the cells.
And I think it will be neutralized by the acids inside the stomach.
> can eating soap give us some of those benefits for viruses that are already in our bodies?
I think the thing people are missing in a lot of these comments is that viruses are typically traveling from the skin to a mucus membrane in your body (which can be in the stomach but also in your lungs and nose), then infecting your cells. Eating soap might impact pathogens in your still in your stomach, but it's not going to dissolve in your blood and circulate through your body at high enough concentrations to impact viruses...
...and if it was high enough concentration: imagine snorting, inhaling or injecting dish soap.
The problem is that it works by simply messing up structural integrity and isn't very specific. Skin is durable and resistant to this but our insides aren't.
I feel like the more important takeaway is that soap makes water a better solvent for washing and hygiene, not necessarily that soap destroys viruses. Also, water that cells can't keep in or out or that sticks to the wrong things can't be used!
Manually washing your hands with regular water eventually has the same degree of efficacy as with soapy water, it just takes a lot longer, so why don't more people conclude that they just need to drink more water to flush the viruses out when they're sick? Why should it be the soap plus the water that makes it magic?
By and large, you want to prevent the contamination that leads to viral infections by keeping the parts of you (or others) that interact with the environment away from the parts of you (or others) that viruses enter through. Because we can't do that all day, every day, we try to lower the odds of anything that might've gotten on us staying on us intact, and soapy water applied and rinsed at a sink is a pretty good way to do that.
Once the viruses are inside us, they're in the cells, and soapy water doesn't have the right properties that our cells and tissues need to maintain an environment that allows them function, largely for the same reasons it's good for cleaning. The biology of life relies on these properties universally, which is why we can't drink salt water or water that's "too pure" like deionized water; one takes water out of our cells, and other puts too much in.
I did a cursory skim and didn't see any mention of the gut biome. I'm not a medical person but my guess would be ingesting soap would harm the good bacteria.
I asked a similar question to a doctor about inhaling alcohol vapor, if that would kill bronchitis or pneumonia (obviously the answer is NO). I can't remember the specific response, but it's unfortunate because if biology were as simple as computer science: pneumonia/bronchitis is an infection, alcohol kills bugs, ergo breath alcohol vapor to stop infection. I also asked in good faith why an I.V. solution of alcohol wouldn't help with sepsis, and I'm pretty sure the answer is that it _would_ treat sepsis but the concentration would have to be so high that you'd have no liver in the end :(
> I'm not seriously envisioning chowing down on bar soap
If you want to find out, my dog will happily chow down on a bar of soap. He tried to eat one a few days ago, and he happily drinks soapy water out of the tub when my kids are in the bath.
You can dog sit him and clean up the mess when the soap comes out the other end.
I was always under the impression that the purpose of soap isn’t to kill bacteria/viruses as the article implies, but to wash those thing off of your hands.
Yes. If a pharmaceutical company's article (with better expertise in this area than the average HNer) isn't enough to convince someone here's an article from UNESCO:
Confusingly, the one graphic in that article shows the soap binding to dirt and viruses and washing them off and away. It does not show the tearing/destruction of the lipid shells, though the article also talks about it.
The article itself has spelling and grammar mistakes in it. The lack of attention to detail does not build confidence in the content.
I was taught about the hydrophilic/hydrophobic nature of soaps and detergents in university decades ago; this is not new information, and is uncontroversial. As others have pointed out, it’s even easy to observe in simple home experiments.
I have never heard of soap disrupting the phospholipid shell of viruses; this is new and “interesting if true”.
The astoundingly bad handling of government communications during the pandemic makes me automatically skeptical of arguments from authority.
However, the takeaway of “wash your hands thoroughly to inhibit disease vector transmission” has amply been proven in the last century.
It's also important to know the current scientific consensus on how Covid spreads.
We now know that people who are infected with Covid emit viral particles into the air while breathing normally. Those viral particles can float in the air for hours and the people who inhale them become infected.
> The most common way COVID-19 is transmitted from one person to another is through tiny airborne particles of the virus hanging in indoor air for minutes or hours after an infected person has been there.
Previously we thought the only transmission route was that infected people who sneeze or cough spray large droplets that fall out of the air quickly, and the people who touch surfaces contaminated by those droplets and later touch a mucous membrane become infected.
So Covid has fully airborne transmission like the measles, not a droplet based spread like the flu. Hand washing is an effective mitigation for a virus with a droplet based spread, but not a virus with an airborne spread.
The Whitehouse post linked above discusses the sorts of mitigations that can be effective against an airborne virus.
I understand soap molecules having polar and nonpolar ends, so that it can help nonpolar things dissolve in water. What I've never understood is, why doesn't soap clean off pine sap?
It does just not very well. Maybe the pine sap is more interested in being stuck to pine sap than soap?
There are things that are much better at cleaning non polar molecules off of surfaces, alcohols, gasoline, lye, brake cleaner etc, but they’re not great at cleaning your hands because they strip the lipids that make up your skin off.
Maybe for the same reason that you can remove greasy hair pomade (or other hard-to-wash-out hair products) from your hair by first applying a conditioner, then washing with shampoo. Supposedly the fats/oils in the conditioner bind to the grease and lets the soap get both.
I don’t have a real answer for you but I will say that olive oil works well for this.
I worked on a Christmas tree lot through my winters as an undergrad and olive oil always worked well. Of course then you need soap and water to remove the olive oil.
>>Coffee grounds or that mechanic paste might do pretty well also
“Magic All Natural Industrial Hand Cleaner (with walnut shells)”
Is downright the best thing I’ve ever encountered for cleaning anything on the hands. Anything sticky, greasy, non-newtonian… etc. it scrubs right off.
Person who’s worked in grimy machine shops for 30 years introduced me to it. Fast Orange is a complete & utter disgrace comparatively.
Coffee grounds are nice, but walnut grounds are far superior.
If you, like me, often find yourself covered in pine sap. The product: Shout, for removing laundry stains will make quick work of removing sap from skin. Maybe the answer to your chemistry question is in there.
Pine sap are not water soluble, even with soap. Pine sap is resin based, resins need a different solvent that can dissolve it such as alcohol or mineral spirits. It the same for wax (THC/CBD) resins, they need alcohol to clean it off.
It the same for blood stains on clothing. They are not generally water soluble, you could get them out if you put it under cold water if the stain is still fresh. Hydrogen Peroxide can dissolve blood stains (fresh or old) since it can be used as a solvent.
I'm pretty sure with H2O2 (hydrogen peroxide) it's actually destroying the chromophores in blood (among other things), not dissolving stuff.
Put differently, it breaks up the stain molecules into smaller molecules and causes other reactions that change them, it doesn't just dissolve them. You can dissolve resinous stuff with various solvents, you're right about that. Stays mostly the same, just goes into solution.
If you use Hydrogen Peroxide, it will often also take some pigment with it from the clothing if that’s what your are getting the blood out from. So be careful not to inadvertently bleach something.
When covid first hit I was smug because while everybody was freaking out buying up all the hand sanitizer and Clorox wipes I remembered the section college biochemistry about surfactants and bought a few extra bottles of soap. Sodium Laureth Sulfate et al. are super cool underrated substances imo
Thankfully it turned out not to cling to surfaces (unfortunately it turns out it was airborne instead) like rhinovirus, so the surface cleaning proved unnecessary.
I'm a huge advocate for washing with soap and water, but this gave me pause:
> washing your hands with soap and water is one of the most effective ways people can keep from getting sick, and from passing the [COVID-19] virus to others
So not to doubt handwashing, but I thought we overwhelmingly determined that COVID-19 doesn't thrive on surfaces (very long) and its primary transmission vector is through the air, from respiratory system to respiratory system, clinging to small moisture particles as it goes.
Also... this article is a bit of a stub. Diagrams would be nice. More detail would be nice, I'd expect better from a company like Pfizer, who I do trust to make vaccines, but this marketing content is low-effort.
> but I thought we overwhelmingly determined that COVID-19 doesn't thrive on surfaces (very long) and its primary transmission vector is through the air,
It can last from hours to days depending on what it lands on and the environmental conditions like light/heat/humidity. (for example see https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...) Viral RNA can still be detected on surfaces for much much longer but that doesn't mean it's going to be getting anyone sick.
You're right that the primary transmission vector is through the air, and that the risk of getting it by other means is much lower but since people often cough and sneeze directly into their hands then wipe their wet (maybe virus filled) hands on things around them it's probably a good idea to keep washing your hands. In fact, it's probably a good idea to wash our hands more often even without Covid concerns. People are gross and spend a surprising amount of time rubbing their eyes or inserting fingers directly into their nostrils.
> “I want to be clear that nothing should change in terms of washing our hands and personal hygiene,”...In a piece for the Conversation, Vally said: “This isn’t to say surface transmission isn’t possible and that it doesn’t pose a risk in certain situations, or that we should disregard it completely. But, we should acknowledge the threat surface transmission poses is relatively small.”
Yeah, you should wash your hands for lots of reasons but I'm not sure COVID-19 is a particularly relevant one. Much more relevant is, say, fecal bacteria, which will make you sick.
Yes, there are lots and lots of people who don't wash their hands with any regularity and others who don't wash them as often as they should. You can find statistics about the fraction of folks washing hands in a public restroom, or just watch for yourself the next time you're in a public restaurant or buying food from a restaurant with an open kitchen.
There are actually multiple grammatical errors throughout. I'm sure they could afford to at least have ChatGPT double check their writing. It's embarrassing when a company of that size makes these kind of mistakes. It hurts trust in the brand.
"Soap, which has been in around for thousands of years"
I remember a science radio program from years ago (might have been https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks) summing up an explanation of how soap works with the summary: "Soap makes water wetter."
It's obviously an over-simplification for the purposes of education, but it works, as it has stuck with me.
More generally, I'm a huge proponent for washing and drying hands after coming home, after using the bathroom and before eating, in order to disrupt a wide variety of infectious diseases. In particular, I consider the fecal-oral route for a wide variety of nasty parasitic diseases. This has had and continues to have major public health benefits.
There are some other considerations. Water temperature, water hardness, soap composition, handwashing technique.
Why post a article on how soap works from the fucking Pfizer website. Fucking disgusting. The are like 1000 different better sources that not advertise for big Pharma scams while explaining how soap works.
Well you tell us how you took the 6th booster after you knew several people who died right after getting the vaxx, but I am sure it was Something Else TM.
It was difficult to grok on the first couple watches because water was taking the role of lipids and air was taking the role of water, but a fascinating and visceral demonstration.
The best link I could find is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_1RfqMH-KM