Cleaning with bleach might increase your chance of getting COPD. How worried should you be?

You shouldn’t breathe in bleach. If you could avoid ever coming in contact with it again, you’d be healthier. But the same is true of high fructose corn syrup and alcohol. We’d all probably be better off if we didn’t drink or eat candy, and yet we persist. Bleach doesn’t give us the pleasant buzz that sugar and ethanol do, but most of us will inhale its fumes at some point—and many have no choice but to do so daily as an occupational hazard. It’s one of the most common industrial disinfecting agents. So how much is too much?

“Raises your risk by 32 percent” sounds like a lot. That’s the number most news outlets are citing, which is the maximum amount that researchers recently found disinfectants could increase a person’s chances of getting COPD. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, as it’s less commonly known, is a lung disease caused by irritation to the airways that can block airflow. If it’s left untreated or is exacerbated by another problem, it can be fatal. That number—32 percent—is accurate, and the implications are troubling. But it’s important to understand it in context.

Standard household use of bleach is not the problem
These numbers come from something called the Nurses Health Study II, long-term project out of Harvard on how lifestyle affects disease risk. Basically, they took a big cohort of nurses several decades ago, asked them a ton of questions about their lives, and then continued to follow up with them periodically. They asked the same questions and performed the same tests, and over time researchers have been able to find associations between particular lifestyle factors and particular diseases. It’s important to remember, though, that they’re just associations. And that the subjects are all nurses. Occupation might not be relevant for studies about diet or exercise, but it’s important when we’re looking at exposure.

Read More at:
https://www.popsci.com/cleaning-with-bleach-might-increase-your-chance-getting-copd-how-worried-should-you-be

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