Homemade Sanitizing and Handwashing Solution
Survival Sanitation: It all Begins with the Hands
by Tactical Intelligence on August 12th, 2011
In a recent article I talked about how to make your own chlorine bleach that can be used not only for water disinfection but for sanitation as well. To make a simple solution that can be used for hand sanitizing, you’ll want to add one cup of household bleach (or homemade bleach) to a gallon of water.
To use, after washing your hands with soap and water simply rinse your hands with the sanitizing bleach solution.
HOMEMADE ANTHRAX KILLER
For an even more effective disinfectant that is actually powerful enough to kill anthrax spores, you’ll want to add a cup of vinegar to the cup-to-gallon sanitizing solution above.
According to Norman Miner the president of MicroChem Lab, vinegar changes household bleach from alkaline to acidic which will make it 80 to 200 times more effective at being an antimicrobial product.
(Nancy Kerchevel – Bloomberg News) “Bleach has been used as a disinfectant for decades. People just assume it will kill everything on a countertop,” Miner said in an interview. “It’s one of the myths.”
Bleach can’t be bottled in an acidic state because it’s unstable, Miner said in an interview. After a day, it would start losing the chlorine that gives it its bleaching power.
Researchers tested the vinegar recipe on dried bacterial spores, considered the most resistant to disinfectants used on microbes, the Euless, Texas-based company said.
After researchers swabbed surfaces with the acidic dilution, all the spores were dead in 20 minutes, Miner said. An alkaline dilution left only 2.5 percent of the areas free of microbes after the same amount of time.
EMERGENCY AID
“In the event of an emergency involving Bacillus anthracis spores contaminating such environmental surfaces as counter tops, desk and table tops, and floors, for example, virtually every household has a sporicidal sterilant available in the form of diluted, acidified bleach,” Miner said in a statement.The vinegar-laced bleach also killed aspergillus negri, commonly recognized by most people as the black fungi that infect the tile grout of shower stalls, Miner said.
“Diluted bleach at an alkaline pH is a relatively poor disinfectant, but acidified diluted bleach will virtually kill anything in 10 to 20 minutes,” Miner said.
Keep in mind that this solution will lose it’s effectiveness after about a day, since it will start losing the chlorine that gives it it’s bleaching power. For household use, given the short effective shelf-life of this solution, you’ll want to make it in smaller amounts that can be used on a day-to-day basis.
