 Okay, everyone. Welcome back to the final little chapter of our conference here. Yeah. All right. I want to thank Kourt, if you guys haven't met him, out there at the table with Fibonacci Saponier. He's making a special shampoo for float tanks. See if you haven't talked to him about that. You definitely should because that's pretty interesting and awesome. Next up for you guys, we have Fred Collie, a Portland local here who is an expert microbiologist who has been kind enough to kind of study up on some of the things that we as an industry are interested in, like hydrogen peroxide and those type of things. And it's here to give you a presentation and we've also built in a good amount of time for a lot of questions from you guys because I know it's a real just big hazy area for all of us in the float tank industry with so little to go on and so little to look towards for resources on that sort of thing. I don't believe he's done a lot of dealings with the health department specifically so any questions about bureaucracy and that kind of process is probably not going to be exactly what we're hoping to address here. More just like actual questions about the chemistry of water and sanitation. So I will pass it off to Fred. Thank you. Well it's been a very interesting weekend and thank you Ashkan for inviting me. Let me tell you a little bit about my own background to kind of orient you. In 1969 I had just finished an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at Louisiana State University Medical School in Tropical Medicine and I was hired by the University of California Medical School in San Francisco and they sent me to Kuala Lumpur Malaysia where I did research on malaria and other parasitic organisms mostly in animals from the tropical rainforest. And the 60s a lot of you are too young to remember but I certainly remember vividly was a time of great cultural change. There were a lot of things going on. The Vietnam War was raging. The women's movement was just getting started. Civil rights. The assassinations. But there was also positive things that we had the Beatles and so forth. And all you need is love. So that was the time that I left the country and went overseas and I had already gotten interested in some things like yoga. I took BKS's classic book Light on Yoga with me. I engard come to this country and I think it was 1964 or 5 and taught yoga at the Ann Arbor YMCA. And so I was interested in yoga and started to practice it. And also when I went to Malaysia I took John Lilly's book The Center of the Cyclone. And I read that. It was very fascinating. But the thing that impressed me the most about Lilly was that his attitude toward research. He had been doing research on dolphins and he came to the conclusion that dolphins were so highly evolved that it was unethical to do research on them anymore. And he said if you're going to do research do it on yourself. And that was when he developed the sensory isolation tank. So I came back to the United States and 75 came up to Oregon. After a few years got a job at Western States Chiropractic College and I taught clinical microbiology, public health and a few other things there. For the next 25 years. So some are retired now but I'm still working for an environmental laboratory as the director of their microbiology department. So I've had lots of experience with inspections from Oregon State and with OSHA. And believe me those inspections are not easy. They last for two or three days. They have people come in and go through all the records and so on and so forth. So I know a bit about that. And so here 40 years have passed and all of a sudden I get a call from Ashconn and he wants to know if I'd be interested in coming and speaking to you at this conference. So I remembered Lilly's work and I went down and talked to him. I liked to set up and so I agreed to come. And I don't know how much of what I say will be relevant to you but it's late in the afternoon at least maybe I can entertain you a bit. So let's begin and we can look at the origins of microbiology and here we see early microbiologists and of course this is a joke but at one time there was no knowledge whatsoever of microorganisms. But there was an epidemic. The learned doctors would say it was due to a volcano exploding somewhere or perhaps the movement of the stars. But for the common people it was usually attributed to evil spirits, spells and so on and so forth. And that changed with the advent of this man. Here you see hysteria across the centuries, the pleasant face of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. And from this name you can tell he was a Dutchman. And he was not a scientist but a fabrics merchant in the town of Delfton, Holland. This was in the mid 17th century, the great new Renaissance, the end of the Renaissance. And he was interested in the quality of fabrics. The Dutch made a lot of fine lace and so he started experimenting with lenses so he could count the fibers and determine the quality of the product. And here's an actual photograph of a Leeuwenhoek microscope. And this is what we call a simple microscope because it had a single lens which was embedded in that piece of wood which was only about three inches high. And then you can see that little screw apparatus on the left picture and at the end of the pin he would put a drop of whatever it was he was looking at. And this man had an inexhaustible curiosity. He looked at his own blood, he looked at seamen, he looked at material to scrape from his mouth. And one day he looked at something and one historian described it was like he opened the door to a curiosity shop that had been closed since the beginning of time. He looked at a drop of water from a mud puddle. And in it he saw microorganisms. First man in history to do so. So here's an illustration of Leeuwenhoek looking through his microscope and you can see that the light for the illumination was the sun. He's looking through the window. A candle simply wasn't strong enough. And so for the next 50 years he wrote letters to the Royal Society of London describing the things that he had seen. So he saw the first protozoa and the first bacteria. Then as we move along we can see the evolution of medicine. And this horrific photograph is a painting that shows a very common procedure, the most common surgical procedure of its time, amputation of a man's leg. And they would get these rough men off the street the whole demand down. The surgeon was trained to amputate the leg as fast as possible because this was the era before anesthesia. Up in the left-hand corner of the spectators you can see an African man was brought in to show them the wonders of western science and look at the horrified expression on his face. The surgeon would complete this operation as fast as in 30 seconds. Take a boning knife, cut off the muscles, strip them back, cut through the bone of the saw, and then the man no longer screaming would be taken off to either live or die. The reason they did this was that if you had gangrene set in on a limb it would spread through their person's body and they would succumb. So it was a common surgical procedure. Now this changed gradually. In the mid-19th century we see for the first time the Hungarian physician Ignat Summelweis ordering his medical students to wash their hands before they delivered babies in the maternity ward. And you can see the cleaning lady over there looking somewhat skeptically at the doctor and he found that soap and water wasn't sufficient. You had to use chlorinated lime. And these doctors were going into an autopsy room where women had died in childbirth from childbed fever, doing an autopsy on the patient, and then coming back and delivering babies without washing their hands. Notice that no one wears gowns. So there was no concept of the transmission of infectious diseases. And even after Levenok had seen bacteria very few people were aware that such things existed. The real change came with Louis Pasteur. Pasteur was a skilled chemist. He was not a medical doctor. He was a PhD and a crystallographer, but had a very brilliant mind. And he was asked by a manufacturer, a beet juice, to determine why his product was contaminated and turning sour. And he also worked with souring wine. And he found little globules in the sick wine and deduced that these were living organisms. And for a man of his intelligence, it was a simple step to conclude that if wine could become infected with microorganisms, so could the human body. And the putrefaction that one so commonly saw in gangrene was likely to be from these organisms. And then you proved that was true in a series of brilliant experiments. The other towering genius of this period, they were contemporaries with Robert Koch in Germany. The Germans were leaders in science at that time. And Koch was working in a very isolated rural area, but worked out the life cycle of anthrax and determined it was due to spores in the soil. And then went on to discover the cause of tuberculosis, which was ravaging Europe at that time. Koch and Pasteur disliked each other intensely. They were both nationalists. Joseph Lister got them together at a scientific conference at one point and got them to shake hands, and that was the height of their relationship. They never collaborated. So this is Joseph Lister, who was a Scottish surgeon. Everybody has heard of Lister. He's been immortalized by Listerine. And here we see one of the great turning points in the history of microbiology. This boy had been run over by a cart and had a compound fracture. That is, the bone was protruding through the skin. In every case, up to now, Lister would have amputated the limb because of the threat of gangrene. But he had had a paper given to him written by a man named Pasteur who suggested that there were infectious particles in the air that caused gangrene. This made sense to Lister. So instead of cutting the boy's leg off, he set the bone and then swabbed down the whole area with carbolyic acid, a phenolic compound, like lysol. It put tinfoil over it to keep it from evaporating, bandaged it up, came back the next morning almost sick with anxiety, took off the bandage and to his delight, there was no sign of infection. So the rest of his life, this is what he did research on, was sterile technique. Now the reason I'm bringing up these figures is that some people forget that diseases everywhere, microorganisms everywhere, I always like Lister's comment to his students. You cannot see bacteria, they are invisible. You have to see them with your mind's eye. And that's good advice for everyone, especially for people that are working with the general public and dealing with things like flotation tanks. We'll come back to that more later. The last thing is Paul Ehrlich, another one of the great German scientists who was a master of the side chain theory. He came up with that hypothesis. And here he is his first positive work with his Japanese assistant, Salversand 606, the first effective treatment for syphilis in 500 years. And so this set the whole era of disinfection. It changed surgery and medical practice forever. This was around 1900. This was over 200 years ago, and so microbiology is very, very well established now. Now, one of the consequences of the discovery of microorganisms was the fact that they were airborne and waterborne. And one of the big problems in the early development of cities was contamination of water. In England, drinking water was pumped directly from the contaminated Thames River, and there was continual problems with cholera outbreaks. And the same thing occurred in cities all over the world. So this is a famous illustration, Death at the Pump. Here's one of my favorites, Bellevue Hospital, a newspaper illustrator's drawing from the late 19th century, with the rats crawling all over the patients. And what I've heard Bellevue Hospital probably hasn't changed too much in that time. And then Hell's Kitchen in New York City. So this is the Lower East Side. If you saw the film The Gangs of New York, that was a pretty accurate depiction of what was going on, although they didn't describe the open privies and the courtyards, the smells, and the infant diarrhea that swept through every summer and killed thousands upon thousands of babies. Groucho Marx grew up in this part of New York, and he said the only reason that his family didn't contract tuberculosis was that they were too poor to buy milk. And milk was one of the common vehicles of tuberculosis, bovine tuberculosis. So things began to change in the early 20th century, around 1910 I would say to be specific. And we had what has been described as the gospel of sanitation. America was on the rise. The Civil War was over. It was the beginning of the construction of the great cities like New York and Chicago. And people had become aware of the importance of sanitation. And screens went up in houses to keep houseflies out. Toilet paper made the scene for the first time no longer the serious catalog. And it was the beginning of the American Public Health Association, which at that time we were way behind Europe as far as public health. And Charles Dickens had written about the plight of the poor, you know, 50 years before. And America was just catching up. And so many of the establishment of many public health organizations occurred at this time. Massachusetts led with the first state health department. And then everyone else followed. Now when I worked for Western States Chiropractic College and now the University of Western States, we became very heavily involved in public health. And one of the reasons is the American Public Health Association is very influential. It's the largest public health association in the world now. If you go to one of their big meetings in Washington, D.C. or New York, there may be 10,000 delegates show up. How would you like to organize that, Oshkan? And when I first went, Chiropractic was really looked down upon, but the Chiropractors did the right thing. They started putting on scientific presentations as a special interest group. And they jumped through all the hoops. They proved that they had an excellent educational system. It was actually dictated by the Department of Education. And in 1995, we achieved full-section status with the American Public Health Association at the meeting in San Diego. So I was involved in that. And I've met many public health workers. And I could give you a little advice in dealing with health departments. These are all educated people. They're scientists. They're logical. They're altruistic. Most of them are very nice people. And if you are polite to them and you have a positive attitude, like you showed me here this weekend, you're not going to have any trouble at all. The problems come when you look upon somebody as your enemy and try to pull fast when on something that never works. Now, I want to say something else about epidemiology. This is the science of public health, and this is the keeping of statistics. This is a little rhyme from Rudyard Kipling, who was in his early years a newspaper correspondent. But it very neatly sums up the attitude of the epidemiologist. You learn everything about your subject. You apply statistics. You keep records. And so forth. Let's look a little bit at transmission of bacterial infections in the workplace. This is a very simple illustration called the Triad of Disease. And I think in the case of public health and with flotation tanks, we don't need to concern ourselves with a vector. That would be something like a mosquito or a tick. Let's hope that doesn't happen. But we have an infectious agent. We have the host, which is you or your client. And we have the environmental conditions that bring them together. So they come into your establishment. And this is a triad you don't want to see. You don't want your client to come in and then claim later that they picked up an infection when they were floating or somewhere else on the premises. So we'll address that a little bit as I move along here. Okay. So this picture, when it came out in the 1950s, astounded everybody. It was one of the first pictures taken with a strobe flash. And it shows droplet nuclei. They become lighter and they float into the air. So if I were to sneeze and didn't cover my mouth, the particles could float from me all the way to the back row of this auditorium. Studies have shown they can float about 30 meters before they land. And this is why closed places like classrooms are good places to spread disease in wintertime when there's flu and colds going around. And also gives you some idea of transmission elsewhere in the workplace, as many possibilities. Now let's look at the structure of the skin, which I think should be of interest to you. We've already talked about the absorption of magnesium sulfate through the skin. I'm a little skeptical of that just because I haven't seen any really conclusive studies. One thing I can say about the skin is if you look at that top layer, that is the stratum corneum, otherwise known as the horny layer of the skin. And that is a very tightly knit layer of cells. And the upper layer of it are dead cells, completely dead. And the living epidermal cells are underneath that and they're continually moving up. And then when they get to the surface and are exposed to the air, they die. And there's also lipids there which keep this layer kind of flexible and impervious to water. So if you have someone that is floating, whether it's in one of your tanks or in a swimming pool, they're not going to become waterlogged from floating for long periods of time because you've got a pretty impervious layer here. Now some things will move through that layer fairly easily. If we had a skin like an elephant, nothing would get through it, but you would lose a lot of your flexibility. And there's continually sloughing off of those outer cells. So when someone is in the flotation tank, they're going to be losing cells in that tank. Now there's something else about the skin and that's the normal bacterial flora. And there's actually been studies done on the ecology of the skin and it varies a lot. The palms of your hand are like the arid wastes of the desert compared to the rainforest of the armpits or the groin. And so you've got a huge amount of bacteria in the armpits but not on the hands and so forth. And these bacteria are continually sloughing off. So you take a shower before you go into your flotation tank, wash off all the bacteria. How long is it before they regain their normal numbers after a shower? About 15 minutes. You'll have as many bacteria as before the shower. What do deodorant soaps do? Like Life Boy or Irish Spring and that sort of stuff. Well we've got a chemical in there that will convert the bacteria in your armpit from gram positive to gram negative. There's just as many bacteria there but they don't produce the same malodorous end product. So one of the common organisms that lives on the surface of the skin is Staphylococcus aureus. Now this is not always a pathogenic organism. It doesn't always cause infection. But there are some strains that do cause infection and they can be transmitted to persons that are vulnerable. So here's some of the Staphylococcal skin infection. And suppose this person, you know you're dealing with a general public, suppose they show up for their float and they have this appearance. So what do you do? Turn them away? There's a good question. Come back when this is over or maybe it's just a little one and you can barely see it. So you say, okay here take this bottle of Vaseline, put some Vaseline on there and that will keep it from stinging when you're in the tub because those salts are going to sting it. So they rub the Vaseline on, they put a little bit more on, they give you back the container, they go in the tub. The next person that comes in uses the Vaseline, puts it on their fingers where they've got a low abrasion and the next thing they've got a Staph infection that was transmitted from the Vaseline. So this is what I mean by being aware and there's more ways to be aware than just laying in a hot tub. So you have to see these things with your mind's eye and kind of make decisions. Here's another condition that's very common, common skin condition probably in the United States, about one to two percent of the public has it, psoriasis. Psoriasis is a classic scaling disorder, they have silvery scales and sometimes it comes and goes, sometimes there's inflammation, even skin cracking and one thing about psoriasis patients is that they're always looking around for something to help their condition and I wouldn't be surprised if people with psoriasis showed up and wanted to see if magnesium sulfate will help them improve. Now they're not going to transmit any bacteria from their condition but there will be a lot of cells sloughing off into the water and we'll come to what to do about that in a minute. Now there's one other thing about showering and that is I read in reading up on these issues I saw that surgeons who are going to do some kind of delicate surgery used to take showers before they would gown up but they don't do that anymore because they showed that the shower loosens off the grafts of bacteria that are then easily shed into the environment where the surgeon's working. So that's an issue also. So what do we do about these things? Now a water filter will remove organic material including epithelial cells and the organic material might include skin lotions and things like that and so that's one thing that can be done. Another thing that I wanted to comment on is that inside of your float tank you have the ceiling and you may have some seams in there and someone told me that there's a heater that kind of keeps the moisture from accumulating but even if you get a little bit of moisture it's very common to have biofilms start to form. If you've ever let your toilet go for a few days without cleaning it and you see a kind of a yellow scum on the surface those are iron bacteria. They get their energy from iron in the water and then they produce a kind of a slimy coat and that will accumulate other organisms and it gets thicker and thicker and it may be a problem in industry. So that's something else to consider. Notice that this slide is from the Center for Biofilm Engineering at Montana State University in Bozeman. So if you want to check that site it will give you all kinds of information on biofilms and their formation. So my advice is that when you're doing your routine cleaning of your tanks to make sure that you use some good household cleaner I kind of like crud cleaner. It has a citrus base and it's biodegradable, not harmful and just clean all of the surfaces routinely and then make a record of it and you won't have any problem. Now what about halophilic bacteria? Halophilic bacteria mean those bacteria that are salt lovers, literally. Salt loving bacteria. The Dead Sea isn't exactly dead nor is the Great Salt Lake. There are halophilic bacteria that live in there that have adapted to life in an extremely salty environment. So here you see someone floating. You wouldn't see this in one of your tanks because there's no light but otherwise it's about the same thing. In the Dead Sea, by the way, they have a big spa business of people that are being treated for psoriasis because the combination of soaking in the salty water and exposure to extreme sunlight helps psoriasis go into remission sometimes for as long as six months. So what's the probability of having halophilic bacteria develop in your float tank? I think it's very slight, especially the way these tanks are maintained. We'll come to that in a minute. This just shows some of the adaptive changes in proteins. You can see on the right there the halophilic bacteria have entirely different surface protein structure than the ones on the left, which are normal bacteria. And there is osmosis going on here. These halophilic bacteria actually have to have high salt content to live. But normal bacteria, if they're put in a salt environment, osmosis will just suck the protoplasm right out of the cell. So what is osmosis? This is an example that anyone can understand. You go from an area of greater concentration to lesser concentration through a membrane. So when bacteria from your client's body go into the epsin salt solution, they're going to be immediately killed by osmosis. Now, in addition to that, we have another adjunct, and that is ultraviolet light. And ultraviolet light is used in combination with hydrogen peroxide. We'll come back to that in a minute. What does ultraviolet light do? Ultraviolet light damages and actually destroys DNA. So you can see the UV light coming in from the upper left there. And the consequence afterwards is the broken chromosomes. This is also the etiology of skin cancer. If you're overexposed to ultraviolet light, you will develop cancers because of this very thing. And it's also a bacteria susceptible. But not equally susceptible. The most susceptible bacteria would be the ones that live in your intestinal tract and are never exposed to the light of day. The ones that are resistant are bacteria that live out in the sunlight. And then we come to hydrogen peroxide. You see this is a very simple molecule related to water, except that it has an extra oxygen. And when that's broken off, it's a reactive oxygen. Hydrogen peroxide is a very interesting chemical. It's been around since early in probably the 20th century. And the first use of hydrogen peroxide was to bleach straw hats, which were very popular at that time. And then as time went on, there were many other uses. So we see the cellular effect of hydrogen peroxide. It oxidizes the cell. Down here it stops the TCA cycle, oxidative phosphorylation. And it stops amino acid biosynthesis. And in short, they cells die very quickly. Hydrogen peroxide exists and is sold in different concentrations. We have less than eight concentrations. If you go in the grocery store, you can get 3% hydrogen peroxide. It's an excellent disinfectant. It's sometimes recommended for people that are having periodontal surgery recovery because it keeps the bacteria from growing in the surgical areas in their mouth. It's hydrogen peroxide put in toothpaste sometimes. It's a tooth whitener. And then at higher concentrations, you can see that the health hazards start to increase. And when you get 20 to 52, the health hazards are about three and remain at that point. Hydrogen peroxide is very caustic at high concentrations. And I understand that you use it in a tank disinfection at about 35%, which is very high. One thing I can say as far as the microbial aspects of hydrogen peroxide is that it's one of the few chemicals that will reliably kill bacterial spores. Bacterial spores are extremely resistant. And there's only a few chemicals like formaldehyde, gluteraldehyde, iodine very weakly, but hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide has been used for decades to sterilize dialysis units and heart-lung machines. The only downside of that is it's corrosive to metals and even plastic with long exposure. So they always have to do surveillance to make sure those parts aren't being damaged. In really high concentrations, hydrogen peroxide has been used as a rocket propellant. The Russians still use it as a propellant for submarines. But it can be explosive in those high concentrations. Now, importance of record keeping, I really was going to comment on this, but after Graham's talk I really was kind of blown away by that. In my business, we keep meticulous records. We have to have a log for the autoclave and a log for the incubator for the bacteria. We have to record all of the expiration dates of our media. And these temperature logs have to be done every day, dated, initialed. And then when the inspectors from the state come in, they go over that with a fine-tooth comb. So my advice in a situation like yours is to keep these records. The DEQ likes to have their records kept in a loose leaf notebook, so when you come in they just hand them the notebook and here it is and they can flip through the pages and see that you've done everything properly. If you don't keep the records properly and you fake it, that's what we call in my business dry-labbing. And that's a bad thing and ultimately will backfire on you. So record keeping and communication is really important. And I think having an organization like this in a conference like this is the best thing you can do to improve the status of your business and organization. Really one last thing. Here's this quotation by Moshe Feldenkreis. I always admired Moshe Feldenkreis's work. He was the originator of somatic body remodeling. And he was a judo practitioner. I also practiced and coached judo for many years. And he was a soccer player and I also did that. So I think this is a good way to end my talk. And I'll open it up for any questions and if I can answer the question, maybe somebody in the audience can. Okay, how's our time going? Thank you, Fred. Yeah, does anybody have a question? Yeah. So how are these chemicals possibly different in the high salt setting, specifically bromine and chlorine and hydrogen peroxide? Yeah, I have an article here that I got online. Hydrogen peroxide is a disinfectant and I have their website if anyone was interested and they mentioned here without going into a lot of detail that there are many permutations. And it changed the pH and that will change the properties of hydrogen peroxide. One thing that's commonly done in hospitals is to mix hydrogen peroxide with parasitic acid. And parasitic acid is simply adding a acidic acid to hydrogen peroxide and then you mix the two together and that's what's actually used in the disinfection of dialysis units. But it would depend upon the situation that certainly has manipulated. What is the website? It's www.lentech.com, L-E-N-N-T-E-C-H. And it's quite interesting, the characteristics of hydrogen peroxide, the corrosiveness, the destruction, how is it produced, how is it transported and stored, applications, how does disinfection work, drinking water disinfection, swimming pool disinfection, cooling towers, does hydrogen peroxide remove chlorine? And the answer is yes, it can be used for dechlorination and so forth. That's a good... And what about the actual testing of these different things? Testing for hydrogen peroxide, can we rely on this sort of testing equipment that's made for regular water in such a crazy solution? I think for the answer to that you have to go to some of the sites that give information on testing for swimming pools. And there was probably many of you are familiar with the site called AskAllan.com and he's a swimming pool guru and he also answers questions on flotation tanks and you could write to him and ask him some of these things. But I'm not really in the business of doing this kind of testing. You want to E. coli? I'll give you E. coli. Yeah, right. What do you think of ozone as a sterilization? Ozone has replaced chlorination in many places. I think Los Angeles uses it now. Sterilization and disinfection are two different terms. Disinfection means destruction of the most pathogenic organism. Sterilization is an absolute term and generally we only use sterilization in the case where there's absolutely no microorganism detected. So an autoclave or hydrogen peroxide would result in sterilization. Ozone probably not. And then do you have the one thing that's thrown out about ozone with float tanks is the fact that it's an enclosed chamber? Any thoughts on like ozone gas being created and potential problems with the enclosed aspects of float tanks? I've heard ozone and bromine I don't know from personal experience but have a slight odor. I was telling someone earlier that I go to a gym where there's a spa and they have, I mentioned that earlier in the talk, I was talking to the manager about how they treat the water in their hot tub. And he said they have a device and I can't remember the name of it right now but it was, they put salt water in their tub and this device breaks the sodium chloride down into sodium and chloride and the chloride then acts as a disinfectant but you don't get chloramines produced so there's no odor. And before they did that they had all these complaints from the clients about the smell of chlorine and you can't detect it all anymore. You were back there? Well, like some bacteria or halophilic there's other bacteria that are acidophilic and the most acidophilic organisms are fungi so if there's an acid environment you often will get fungus growing. Most bacteria wouldn't grow on that. You might get bacteria in a bog and that's kind of like the Dead Sea where you have a really extreme environment and organisms have evolved to live in that environment but you're not going to get those in a flotation center. I would think so. I think from what I know about flotation tanks the high cell concentration it's really overkill with this UV light and filtration and hydrogen peroxide that it's really a very sanitary setup. However, in reading through Ask Allen's advice to clients there were some situations where someone said oh my flotation tank I've been using it for a couple of years now and started to smell bad and that means where there's smoke there's fire something's growing in there. Benjamin? Yes. You could get the biofilm just above the water line or you could get it higher than that if there's any moisture at all they won't move into it. Well, you just have to go in and clean it physically periodically because it'll always come back. That's what we see commonly in my lab because they do a lot of drinking water as this will show up in somebody's well water. So what do you do? If you've got iron vector in your well water your water starts to have a metallic taste. Well, we advise them to take a gallon of bleach pour it in the well, leave it overnight run the water the next day until there's absolutely no order of bleach and then your problem's gone until the next time. And usually we see iron bacteria about this time of year because it's the warmest time of the year and they've had a chance to grow all summer but all of these wells along the Columbia River are full of iron bacteria. We've done many tests on them over the years. Yes? Get the biofilm. That's unlikely that there would be a biofilm on the bottom of the tank because of the... that's where you have the high concentration of epsom salts but it's going to be above that level where you don't get the salts. Yes? I don't remember reading that but I wouldn't be surprised. Hydrogen peroxide easily breaks apart and so UV light might have an effect on it. I really don't know. I wanted to say something too about the absorption through the skin. I remember this is a kind of funny story. There's a kind of a folktale in Denmark that if you stick your feet in a bucket of vodka you will get drunk. And a couple of graduate students in Copenhagen actually did a test where they did that. They stuck their feet in a tub full of vodka for an hour or an hour and a half and then they drew their blood and looked for blood alcohol there wasn't any. So a waste of vodka. Or maybe not. Yes? Well, if it got into the tank there's no problem because the bacteria wouldn't... this guy could go in the tank without putting any Vaseline on the skin and the bacteria would be killed. It would probably sting like heck though. Yeah, up here? Well, I think these... she's asking about cleaning the floors and the bathrooms and that's a good point. I was going to mention that and that's where I had that sign about wash your hands. I think in your business you want to keep the place to sparkling clean and probably clean at every morning the first person that's there and maybe even more than once a day make sure that the bathrooms are clean, the floors are clean and I really like these citrus based cleaners because they're biodegradable they don't have much of an odor it's kind of an orange peel odor and they're very effective and that's all you need to do but somebody has to do it. And there are a lot of people that don't like to clean toilets can you believe that? The brand of cleaner? What would you say? Other brands of cleaners? I don't know, Simple Green works. Pardon me? I like Prud Cleaner. It's a very powerful one. Prud Cleaner? Prud Cleaner. You can get it at Home Depot. Concentrate. But there's others. It doesn't matter. You just use it. Yes. A wand? A wand. It will burn you? It'll like get a country. Well it's a short wave UV light then in some form it's a short wave UV light if it'll burn you. No. No, you need to scrub it off. It's more tenacious than that. The other thing with these filters they've been talking about routinely changing the filters. And if you don't do that the organisms will actually multiply on the surface of the filter the biofilm will form on the surface of the filter and it no longer works. And I've done analysis of a number of filters over the years. People say what's wrong with my filter? You need a new one. That's all there is to it. It's covered with biofilm. Yes. How do you what? Bleach. Chlorine. Chlorine producing core means and the potential negative health effects of that? Well chlorine fumes are toxic and it's toxic to the skin. It's toxic to the internal organs. And I don't see any reason for using bleach under normal conditions if things are clean you'd be better off using hydrogen peroxide. Bleach is cheap and it's very effective but it just smells bad. And it's very pervasive. If you get it on your skin it will smell like bleach. And just chlorine in general like the use of chlorine in even a pool does that result in toxicity? The toxicity of chlorine in the pool well I don't know that much about the research but there's been a big trend to move away from chlorination of water like ozonation just because of the potential health hazards. And we actually are kind of interested to add ourselves about a stress test that we just got done in a water testing lab with some of the water from our tank. Yes. So a couple things. The first one I wanted to say was the wiping down the inside of the tanks. When we were in Sweden we had another water health expert come up and the... There we go. I hate that. So when we were in Sweden we talked we had another speaker who was a water expert and what he said was the inside the tank, the water very hard to have organisms multiply especially within that. And for wiping down the inside of the tanks he recommended two to three times a week at least for getting inside there and actually wiping down the walls simply because that's one of the areas especially with so much humidity and moisture in there where bacteria can actually grow and where the salt's not going to get. And then the main thing I wanted to say was we've been doing water tests every two weeks and submitting them for lab tests for staff and for E. coli and for pseudomonas which have all come back consistently negative every single time to the below the lowest possible detection threshold. And then I found out about something called a challenge study which maybe some of you know about but if you don't then this is something that'll really help you in your health department which is if you ask for a challenge study from your local testing place they will actually inject whatever bacteria you want into your solution and then monitor over the course of in our case four hours how that drops with your water level and with your disinfection. So just you know even though we were coming back negative we're like okay well maybe that just means we don't have that much bacteria around. So the minimum detection threshold was less than 10, less than two and less than two parts per million I believe. I can't remember which those applied to off the top of my head and so they injected around 20,000 parts per million of each of the different three types of bacteria that we were interested in testing and like I said it's over a four hour period and we disinfect with straight hydrogen peroxide no UV and when they took the test at the first half an hour for the water all of the levels were below the minimum possible detection threshold. So within half an hour of injecting this huge amount of bacteria into the water it had gone down to below the detectable threshold and we have all of the documentation which we can send along to anyone who's interested but mainly especially just with your own tanks getting documentation in the challenge study is something we just discovered that ends up being hugely helpful. I think enzymes and how to control them to not be dangerous for the skin? Enzymes in what context? In the biofilm? Biofilm is not going to have pathogenic organisms at least initially I think if you keep the place clean it won't be any problem at all. Enzymes are proteins and proteins are easily denatured with a soap and certainly hydrogen peroxide they wouldn't last a second. No, it's not necessary. I wanted to say one other thing when Ash called me up he and I went down to the float center and talked to him and then he invited me to come back and take a float and I did and it's been kind of on my bucket list and I had no problem at all with going in the tank I thought their system was quite sanitary and it was amazing. Great, thank you. Thank you so much Fred.