AIDS TREATMENT NEWS #134, September 6, 1991
John S. James
* One scientist was concerned that our note might be misunderstood by laboratory personnel, who often use hydrogen peroxide to clean up laboratory spills of fluids containing HIV. Hydrogen peroxide is well- accepted for this use (inactivating the free virus on a surface). Our warning only applied to drinking dilute hydrogen peroxide, or bathing in it, as an HIV treatment. We referred to preliminary findings that hydrogen peroxide, in lower concentrations inside cells, could stimulate HIV growth.
One historical note is that public-health experts considered hydrogen peroxide as an alternative to bleach for cleaning injection-drug needles (when the alternative was that contaminated needles would be re-used with no cleaning at all). Apparently both substances are about equally effective in killing the virus on surfaces. Bleach (aqueous sodium hypochlorite) was chosen because hydrogen peroxide can easily deteriorate if stored improperly, and users would not know that it had lost its potency.
* Another reader was unable to find substantiation for our concern that hydrogen peroxide can act biochemically within infected cells to increase HIV growth. One recently-published article, which we did not have when we went to press, is "Reactive Oxygen Intermediates as Apparently Widely Used Messengers in the Activation of the NF-Kappa-B Transcription Factor and HIV-1," by Ralf Schreck and others, EMBO JOURNAL pages 2247-2258, August 1991.
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