How Do They Help?

You may be asking yourself… how do antimicrobials help me? The answer is great families have good chemistry…

For starters, did you know that antimicrobials play a key role in preventing the spread of disease? That’s right! Whether you are swimming in a pool, visiting your doctor for a check-up, or even siting in a movie theater watching a new release, antimicrobials help disinfect, sterilize, or sanitize the surfaces you may contact.

Did you also know that antimicrobials help keep your drinking water safe by killing harmful microbes? This helps prevent you and your family from getting sick or contracting infections such as cholera.

But helping to keep us safe isn’t the only way antimicrobials help. We all want our world to thrive now and in the future. Whether it’s preventing products from spoiling or stopping them from breaking down, antimicrobials help products last longer and protect our world’s precious resources.

Preventing Disease Takes Good Chemistry

When doctors began to deeply study diseases more than 150 years ago, they discovered that microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi were responsible for many diseases and infections. Microorganisms were making people sick. In order to stop this, scientists and doctors not only developed antibiotic medicines for disease prevention, but also harnessed the power of chemistry and developed antimicrobial disinfectants, sterilizers, and sanitizers that helped stop or eliminate the spread of disease and infections.

Today, antimicrobials are used in homes and public places, such as medical facilities and schools, to kill germs that could make us sick. They are also used to treat drinking water, and helped in the virtual elimination of typhoid fever, cholera, and other waterborne diseases. It’s now safe to drink water from our faucets because antimicrobials treat and protect our water supply by eliminating harmful microbes and pathogens such as E. coli and Legionella.

But it isn’t just the day-to-day benefits of antimicrobials that help keep us safe. When floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters occur, water supplies are contaminated. As a result, health departments, health authorities, and public water systems use antimicrobials to disinfect the water so it’s safe to drink and use for food preparation.
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Increasing Sustainability Takes Good Chemistry

Communities strive to reduce, reuse, and recycle our precious resources. Antimicrobials help in this effort by preventing products from spoiling or breaking down so they last longer.

Think about the wood used to build your home. Antimicrobials can be used as preservatives to protect wood from decay caused by pests, mold, and mildew. Such protections help extend the life of the wood therefore extending the life of your home. When our wood supply lasts longer, our communities can reduce the demand on forests, which means fewer trees are cut down and more oxygen is released into the atmosphere.

Or, consider water, our most valuable resource. Water can be recycled with the use of antimicrobials! Reusing our water means that we can lessen our reliance on freshwater systems.

When it comes to municipal and industrial wastewater, antimicrobials are used to treat water so it can be reused safely for many purposes such as:

Irrigating crops and landscapes
Recycling water used for cooling and steam generation in industrial facilities
Recharging groundwater
Flushing toilets

We all want our world to thrive now and in the future. By investing in sustainable solutions, we can do right for our communities and for our environment.