Re: Good point!

Hello Cwk,

While Jim Humble has some ideas on how chlorine dioxide works, he hasn't been able to bring forward any evidence that his ideas are correct. I, and others, have repeatedly asked him how he came to the conclusion that chlorine dioxide is selective in the bacteria it kills, and he remains unresponsive.

Looking further into this, I find that chlorine dioxide is registered with the EPA as both a disinfectant and a sterilizer. I believe to qualify as a sterilizer, it has to be able to remove at least 99.9% of all bacteria in 5 minutes. The concentrations listed for the products that provide this vary from 3 - 500 PPM chlorine dioxide, with most in the 25 - 100 PPM range.

I actually contacted a testing laboratory to see if they would run some tests with "good" bacteria and chlorine dioxide. They told me that I would be wasting my money. Good bacteria is easy to kill off and requires much less of a concentration of chlorine dioxide than bad bacteria, in most cases. One of the hardest bacteria to kill with chlorine dioxide is Mycobacterium bovis which is tuberculosis. With chlorine dioxide it requires 500 PPM for 10 minutes for a 99.9999% kill.

I tried to figure out how I could test this for myself and decided that the bacteria that form yogurt are beneficial. If I could add some chlorine dioxide solution to my yogurt starter and still form yogurt, that would prove that Jim Humble was correct.

Unfortunately, I was unable to make yogurt when chlorine dioxide was added. I did fine with just citric acid , but when an activated sodium chlorite solution was added I was unable to make yogurt.

When I passed my test methods and results to Jim Humble asking him why the good bacteria was being killed off, he remained unresponsive.

My conclusion is that the people who manufacture, use, and test these products daily know more about this topic than Jim Humble does. This is also backed up by my efforts at testing.

You may want to consider doing your own round of testing, or finding a laboratory to do the tests for you. I think it was only going to cost a few hundred dollars to have the tests done, and that would give you a better understanding on how chlorine dioxide works with bacteria.

On the topic of iodine, this was studied in some clinical trials with humans. They noticed some variations when the people were taking water with higher levels of chlorine dioxide in it (5 PPM), but in the final analysis the variation was determined to be insignificant. This study only ran for 12 weeks, so we don't have any data on long term effects.

Tom Tweet