John Cuthber

It would be an exceptionally safe drug. Even placebos have about a 5% risk of adverse effects. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/science-blog/harmful-placebos

OK Let's start there because we agree about it. If the risk is low enough, it's not worth worrying about. Why? Do you accept that essentially, it's "too small to worry about" because it's "too small to make any (noticeable) difference"? Well, we have been using the stuff for over half a century. And nobody noticed the difference. Even though we have systems in place to check, nobody noticed.

Choosing to get the wrong answer is also absurd.

No, and that's the point. It's clearly absurd.

"Is it permissible to use infinity, which is not defined in physics, to assume the impossibility of traveling at the speed of light?!" Yes, particularly if you use a reductio ad absurdum argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum It is absurd to imagine that something with a non-zero rest-mass could get to the speed of light because it would take an infinite amount of energy to do so.

I'm sorry; I thought I had made it clear. For any set of experiments, statistical power is finite. I understand that. How did you come to the conclusion that such a test has not been done? You are the one saying we need more testing; You are also the one saying that we don't need to find the problem Come back when you have finished arguing with yourself. As I said, are you offering to pay for it? But. more importantly, what do you think this is? AFAICT you have yet to explain why you think we do not already know that the risk from H pylori is greater than that from the drug. Do you realise that neither estimate of probability needs to be very precise? We know that it is small. (Because, if it was high, it would be noticeable- e.g via the yellow card scheme or through American ambulance chasing lawyers As wiki points out "In 2020, it was the 222nd most commonly prescribed medication in the United States, with more than 2 million prescriptions.".) And that's all we actually ned to know. This is exactly what statistical power has to do with it. We did tests. They were not powerful enough to be sure of the outcome; they never can be. But they were good enough to know that the cure was better than the disease.

Reminds me of this.

Iodometric titration, but I can't see how that's relevant. It's a chemical. It is always the same. Fundamentally, the material you posted the data for is just bleach. I think the amine oxide is there as a surfactant/ thickener. The other alkalies are there because hypochlorite is more stable in alkaline solution. What are you trying to achieve?

Really? This whole thread seems to be full of speculations and errors.

I don't think you can get high purity sodium hypochlorite as a solid powder- it usually decomposes a bit when you remove the water.

There are two problems with that. The first is that's not how testing works. If you are lucky, it goes like this: A study of a hundred patients would probably tell you about an effect that happened in 10% of them, but might miss an effect that happened in 1% of them. If you raise the sample size to a million, you will almost certainly spot any side effect that happens in 0.01% of teh population. So, at best, if you have a big enough cohort, you can detect an adverse effect that is very rare. But if the effect is rare enough, you may never be able to get a large enough test pool. If you are unlucky, you find something like this; the drug raises the lifetime cancer risk from about 30% (or whatever it is) to 30.1%. You need a huge, well designed study to find an effect like that. Such trials are expensive And here's the big problem with your suggestion. What do you do with the result? The people prescribing metronidazole know it's associated with a small risk of harm from cancer. But they are using it to treat a condition with a relatively large risk of harm. Actually putting a number on the first risk- say it's a 0.1234% higher relative risk- does not change clinical practice. So you would end up spending a lot of money to confirm something which the doctors already know, and already act on. Now, if you personally are a billionaire and want to waste your money on such a programme, that's your choice. But I suspect the rest of us would prefer the healthcare industry to spend its limited resources on things where the outcome will actually make a difference. Don't you agree?

For what it's worth, we were using lead lined coffins long before we had discovered radioactivity. https://gizmodo.com/workers-discover-700-year-old-lead-coffin-beneath-notre-1848660870 Lead is watertight. (well... we can call it "water".) A zinc lined lead coffin (once it's occupied) is an electrolytic cell to generate hydrogen. That's... not what I'd have done.

Actually, we now know that all spiders are radioactive.

Thanks Phi. Just in case any republicans think the video is absurdly far-fetched. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/14/ted-cruzs-doomed-war-on-sex-toys-and-masturbation/ And that's from the Telegraph which is definitely Right-leaning.

Is there a version I can see without signing up for Twitter?

No Except, I guess, saying "50%" can only be wrong by +/- 50%

We still do sometimes; it's very effective.

I should have mentioned x-rays too. The carcinogenicity (and other risks) of metronidazole are still under investigation- as are those with any other drugs in medical use. https://yellowcard.mhra.gov.uk/

Very easy. A can of compressed hydrogen with a catalyst would be a better weapon than a water supply.

Fat cows bend in angles. The one I learned for the lanthanides would no longer be considered acceptable in polite conversation. Incidentally, "tetrel" is a new one for me. When was that coined? That means we have the noble gases, the alkali metals, the halogens, the alkaline earths, the chalcogens, the pnictogens , the tetrels and "the boron group" The trivalent ones need better PR.

English as a second language? There is no such thing as "American English". There is English; and there are mistakes. I suspect that a large part of the actual answer to the original question is a fall in the expenditure on education. Yes they do. It means "change" not "improve"

Hypochlorite bleach definitely expires. Also, are you aware of this sort of thing? https://www.rd.com/list/beauty-products-packaging-symbols/

What's special about cancer? Plenty of drugs have a variety of ways of killing you. https://bnf.nice.org.uk/drugs/metronidazole/#side-effects And you need to balance the risk of side effects with the risks of not taking the medication.

Alcohol, sunlight, silica and the fumes from diesel engines are known human carcinogens. Do you suggest that we ban them? Or do you think we should consider the benefits as well?

It's a lot easier to ask their next of kin...