I have a hypothesis about the secret ingredient in the Cambodian condom lubricant acne cure.
Let me explain how my illumination came about.
I am an American developmental biologist with a cushy full-time job at the INSERM, which is the French National Institute of Health. Institute singular, although recently, eight thematic institutes were created under the INSERM umbrella, of which only a very small minority of employees understand the significance. I’m not one of them; some subtleties of life in France still escape me, even after fourteen years of living here.
Nearly exactly two years ago, my family and I moved to Toulouse to follow a limited-time-only offer for my husband. Three delightful options in the French research system include the (remote, but real) possibilities of:
• attaining a tenured position quite young,
• getting paid (little, but regularly until retirement) to conduct full-time publicly funded research without a mandatory teaching requirement,
• transfer to any other site where your umbrella organization has a presence.
These policies have made it possible for me to work 2 days of every fortnight in Paris, and spend the rest of the time enjoying a large rental house and its backyard, and scrubbing a swimming pool on an alternate basis with my husband. And doing research on a related subject in Toulouse, of course. It’s worth it. We will likely move back to Paris next year, where I still have a few people working for me and in turn, where I work for/with many more. It’s all very collegial in my immediate research circle.
School started for my and all other French kids last Tuesday – they are nearly 9 and well into 11 postnatal years, respectively – and I wanted them to enjoy some last bits of summer. It was a sweltering, heavy 32ºC this afternoon. I suggested we change into swimsuits and head out to the pool. I would never have dug the thing, since this sort of pool is highly unecological and far more expensive in time and chemicals than I think it’s worth. But we need to give it back in good shape with the house in the long run, and the children and their father enjoy it a lot.
Among the chemicals that are thrown into this hole to keep the bacterial and algal populations under control are chlorine tablets, which are insufficient in our hands to keep the green bloom off, and as of last year when we discovered them, quaternary ammonium salts. These are also found in the disinfectant I remember using when I got pierced ears (benzalkonium chloride) and a number of other substances. We use quat-containing detergents in the tissue culture room to disinfect the hoods; these are reputedly more effective than ethanol.
If you know more about these chemicals, Wikipedia would like a hand with the entry to which I just linked.
Part of what inactivates the chlorine is getting oxidized in the strong sunlight, not helped by our finding it difficult to titrate the pH with the lame bases that are sold. Apparently something also happens to the quats to make them non-toxic to the local algae, after a week or so, for there is a green hue to the sides of the pool more often than not. Don’t give me any pool advice, I don’t want it. I wonder if the quats don’t react back to ammonia again, which might give a similar effect to having my kids AND their friends not want to get out of the pool to use the toilet. Or maybe I should encourage them to pee in the pool, in the hopes that it will slow down the degradation of the quats. I’m not a chemist.
I was web-browsing rather than washing the dishes this evening, to speculate on how well the quats in our pool really are biodegradable over the long run, when I came across this recent article by Vieira et al. in PLoS One.
Perhaps you knew that these quaternary ammonium cationic surfactants, so useful for wiping down laminar flow hoods, are also used in some spermicidal lubricants, as an alternative to the more common non-ionic surfactant, nonoxynol-9. Vieira et al. found that the quats studied were more effective bactericides at sublethal doses for human cells than nonoxynol-9 or other surfactants (and that actually none of them are great spermicidal agents at these low, non-irritating doses).
All this sounds to me like the acne treatment that got so much press recently may well be the anti-microbial property of the lubricant in the common condom brand used in Cambodia.
Now that you have an idea of how I think (no, I don’t mean about condoms, I mean in a disjointed non-linear manner!), in the future I will probably restrict myself to writing about developing embryos, about which I know a little more and where subjects abound. I also usually write shorter posts, and will probably mirror from my other blog for a while until I adjust. You might expect a judicious dose of navel contemplation, but the fuzz will stop there as I have no close relationships to any vertebrate species between fish and humans and am unlikely to post cat or dog pictures. You are duly warned.
(cf. Steve)
So happy to see your first post on NN! Welcome.
Off with a bang, too. Few would dare lead off with a line about condoms. So let me get this straight – the lubricant used in Cambodian (only Cambodian? No other brands?) contains a low concentration of spermicide which can act as an anti-bacterial, thus aiding in the clearing of acne? Is the nonoxynol-9 alternative used in Cambodian condoms less active than nonoxynol itself? These condoms aren’t compromised as a result, are they? Feel like I missed something here.
Yikes! That was fast, Anna. And thanks.
My feeling is that only the young sex-industry workers there had tried this novel acne treatment out in sufficient numbers to get an article written about the phenomenon. And it snowballed from there. It’s apparently a bit difficult to know the lubricant formulation of different condom manufacturers. These Number One Plus condoms are provided by a non-profit US group called Population Services International, who may not have been prepared with the recipe on hand when this hit the Agence France Presse newsfeed.
No suggestion of compromise in performance, although the nonoxynol-9 link tells us that as a spermicidal without a condom, it’s not effective except at such high doses that mucous tissues become irritated and that much more susceptible to infection by STD viruses.
My first thought was “you have a hypothesis about the secret ingredient in the WHAT?!!” I must be watching the wrong news channel.
Hmm. I wonder what happened to my picture of benzalkonium chloride?
What a splash start! I’m looking forward to more developing insights.
Good to have you aboard,
AleHeather.Thanks for the welcome, folks. I’ve got a lot to live up to; it’s a little intimidating.
Yes, indeed, welcome Heather! It is strange to write “welcome” as you have been so active in NN discussions. I hope you’ll be continuing to participate in those as well as blogging yourself – as well as all the Paris-Toulouse commuting and everything else, of course. A true multitasking lifestyle!
Hm, I missed this the first time around, but thanks to an incoming link from a more recent post, here I am.
For whatever *that*’s worth.