Re: "speckling" v "staining "

Christina Z. Anderson wrote:
>

> So far we have two bad experiences--Clay and you. And several good
> experiences--me, Roman, Ryuji, and someone else from Europe I can't
> remember...

Actually there was another person who reported a problem here; hers
involved skin lesions as I recall. It's a small sample so far, as you
say, and as such carries a huge margin of error; a larger sample will
give a more accurate idea of the risk for sure, and chances are that the
risk for a larger group will be smaller than 42%. But we won't know if
that is actually the case til the numbers come in.

As to relative toxicity of the two, my glutaraldehyde came with 12 pages
of warnings, and the glyoxal with one paragraph. But they came from
different companies, so maybe they just have different policies about
warnings.

I'm certainly not drawing any conclusions about either glyoxal or
glutaraldehyde, one way or the other, only providing counterexamples
(pointing out black swans, if you will) to categorical statements that
have been made. But I keep coming back to the same thing: there is, as
you say, a large set of observations about glyoxal, since it has been
widely used for 10 or 15 years. If the case can be made, statistically
speaking, that glyoxal doesn't provide adequate stain resistance, it
just seems to me we would have heard more about that problem before now.
I suppose it's possible that people have just been printing stained
pictures all this time because they were too dumb to know any better,
but I have more respect for my fellow gum printers than to assume this
is the case.

By the same token, if glyoxal and glutaraldehyde were equally dangerous,
surely we should have been hearing reports of glyoxal reactions over the
years from some of the many many people who have used it.
Katharine
Received on Sat Sep 10 11:08:23 2005