The Hightower Report: The spreading plague of anti-bacterial products
Have you had your daily minimum requirement of triclosan today? How about your dosage of triclocarban?
Chances are you have, but don't know it. These are two anti-microbial chemicals, which might sound like a good thing, except that they disrupt the human body's normal regulatory processes. Animal studies show, for example, that these triclos can be linked to the scrambling of hormones in children, disruption of puberty and of the reproductive system, decreases in thyroid hormone levels that affect brain development, and other serious health problems.
Yet, corporations have slipped them into all sorts of consumer products, pushing them with a blitz of advertising that claim the anti-bacterial ingredients prevent the spread of infections. The two chemicals were originally meant for use by surgeons to cleanse their hands before operations, but that tiny application has now proliferated like a plague, constantly exposing practically everyone to small amounts here, there, and everywhere, adding up to dangerous megadoses.
Triclosan and triclocarban were first mixed into soaps, but then – BOOM! – brand-name corporations went wild, putting these hormone disrupters into about 2,000 products, including toothpaste, mouthwashes, fabrics, and (most astonishingly) even baby pacifiers! Today, use of the chemicals is so prevalent that they can be found in the urine of three-fourths of Americans. They also accumulate in groundwater and soil, so they saturate our environment and eventually ourselves – one study found them in the breast milk of 97% of women tested.
More at http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2014-03-21/the-hightower-report/ .
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... poisoning our environment and our bodies the world over. 
For years its been known that the antibacterials don't do much. Most illness is viral. Virus =/= bacterium.
What the antibacterials do is make bacteria a bit more resistant. All that nasty, evil "natural selection" stuff. The relative risk of ever-so-slightly more resistant bacteria to each user of these products is small; the risk to others is small, but with 300 million Americans the risk for a small fraction is very large. The argument was made that by using these we ultimately hurt others.
was the response. Nobody cared. Nobody wanted to hear it. The perceived risk to the user of not using the products was greater than the induced risk to some stranger, even if the benefit of the products was very nearly 0.
But some "link" showing that in some models triclosan and triclocarban might have a hormonal effect; the very idea that chemicals we absorb and ingest might somehow make their way into our bodies (how counterintuitive is that?); the general fear of chemicals, because we all should live in a chemical-free natural state might be enough. The minute risk of a link in an animal model that might affect "me" suddenly makes it worthwhile where the virtually certain risk that it would affect another leaves good old altruistic, Xian, whatever, "me" utterly cold.
(The downside: I have students who insist they're not made of chemicals. Chemicals are bad. They're unnatural. They want all the chemicals out of their body. Cyanocobalamin is evil sounding and must be avoided; "vitamin B12" is good. Give them a test and that's how they'll answer. They're the same stuff. It's like a Star Trek:TNG episode in which a "baryon sweep" would remove all the baryons from the Enterprise. The group I was watching the episode with the first time laughed until they cried. The idea of removing all the neutrons and protons from the Enterprise, leaving only an electron cloud in space ... "It's a Romulan plot to destroy the Enterprise!" Priceless.)
