Quats

Quats

There’s evidence that a chemical compound found in many home cleaning products is causing reproductive difficulties in animals in laboratory tests. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Hrubec: My research lab studies birth defects, so we breed a number of mice for that study. In 2006, we noticed that our research colony of mice were having fewer babies and were taking longer to get pregnant.

Terry Hrubec is a research assistant professor in the College of Veterinary medicine at Virginia Tech.

Hrubec: When I went to investigate possible causes, I noticed that the animal care staff was spraying their hands with disinfectant before handling the mice. I thought this might be the possible cause of the reproductive problems that we were seeing.
So to test this, we exposed mice for long-term – six months, to see if that decreased their reproductive efficiency, both in the number of babies born and the number of litters that the mice would have over that time period. What we found was that mice exposed to the disinfectant had fewer numbers of babies and also fewer numbers of litters. They took longer to get pregnant then the unexposed mice.
We found out that there is very little work done on toxicity of this disinfectant, which is a quaternary ammonium compound, often called a QAC or a Quat. And these are disinfectants, cleaners, antimicrobials that are found in a wide number of cleaning products, personal care products, and have industrial applications as well.

We’ll hear more about Quats in future programs. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Quats

A chemical compound found in many home cleansing products could be doing more than just clean.
Air Date:04/27/2018
Scientist:
Transcript:

Quats

There's evidence that a chemical compound found in many home cleaning products is causing reproductive difficulties in animals in laboratory tests. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Hrubec: My research lab studies birth defects, so we breed a number of mice for that study. In 2006, we noticed that our research colony of mice were having fewer babies and were taking longer to get pregnant.

Terry Hrubec is a research assistant professor in the College of Veterinary medicine at Virginia Tech.

Hrubec: When I went to investigate possible causes, I noticed that the animal care staff was spraying their hands with disinfectant before handling the mice. I thought this might be the possible cause of the reproductive problems that we were seeing.
So to test this, we exposed mice for long-term - six months, to see if that decreased their reproductive efficiency, both in the number of babies born and the number of litters that the mice would have over that time period. What we found was that mice exposed to the disinfectant had fewer numbers of babies and also fewer numbers of litters. They took longer to get pregnant then the unexposed mice.
We found out that there is very little work done on toxicity of this disinfectant, which is a quaternary ammonium compound, often called a QAC or a Quat. And these are disinfectants, cleaners, antimicrobials that are found in a wide number of cleaning products, personal care products, and have industrial applications as well.

We'll hear more about Quats in future programs. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.