Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mzs 2339 days ago
They are proposing the use of peracetic acid instead of chlorine.
1 comments

This may also induce a kind of dormant state in bacteria as many chemical stresses do. So whether a new chemical treatment is more effective needs to be tested in light of this knowledge. While peracetic acid has known disinfectant properties, it's only been used for washing hands as far as I know, not for ingestion. It's also a very strong irritant even at low concentration, plus it usually contains a mixture of acetic acid, hydrogen peroxide and sulfuric acid in various proportions. I am not sure how this would be controlled and there's been no study on ingestion of this combination of substances in humans.