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Christmas of 2018 was awful.
Everyone in our house got sick with the stomach flu, and it was not pretty.
This winter Mandy and I were determined not repeat that nightmare and so she cracked open a bottle of bleach. This was a big deal - we never use bleach to clean our house - but it's the most effective way to kill germs.
Or so we thought.
Now that we're in the middle of the Coronavirus Pandemic, Mandy's been away with the kids and I was all set to clean our house from top to bottom... with bleach.
That is until this quote from a National Geographic article popped into my newsfeed:
Using bleach “is like using a bludgeon to swat a fly,”...
"...says Jane Greatorex, a virologist at Cambridge University. It can also corrode metal and lead to other respiratory health problems if inhaled too much over time.
“With bleach, if you put it on a surface with a lot of dirt, that [dirt] will eat up the bleach,” says Lisa Casanova, an environmental health scientist at Georgia State University. She and other experts instead recommend using milder soaps, like dish soap, to easily sanitize a surface indoors and outdoors."
Dish Soap is as good as bleach?
Maybe it's time we challenged our assumptions of what makes things clean?
"Soap works so effectively because its chemistry pries open the coronavirus’s exterior envelope and cause it to degrade. These soap molecules then trap tiny fragments of the virus, which are washed away in water." (Sarah Gibbons, National Geographic, MARCH 18, 2020)
Please don’t use bleach to clean your toilet! It goes directly into the water supply, which already has plenty of toxins. Please try a cleaner with hydrogen peroxide instead.