- Joined
- Dec 18, 2022
A lot of people don't understand why pressure cookers are so effective at sterilization, and why the same principles apply to gas sealed containers much like the HRT ones.Re the pressure cooker:
I don't poison mentally ill kids with bathtub HRT, but I do make a lot of jam. You can absolutely use the pressure cooker method to sterilise jars sufficiently for jam making. (Personally I use an electric baby bottle steriliser because I'm lazy, I had one still laying around, and it's faster.) However, jam (and other preserves) have natural acids added, and also they get introduced to your body via the human digestive system. The human digestive system is in fact robust as fuck against all but the most dangerous pathogens. As long as you followed enough food safety guidance to not grow botulism in your jam, no one will be poisoned by it. Please keep it in the fridge after you open it, though, homemade or shop bought.
The human bloodstream however is very much not robust against bullshit being injected directly into it. There is absolutely no way that the standard to which jam makers sterilise jars (and we are basically just making sure we don't grow literal botulism) is sufficient for IV medication.
tl;dr - at best, this stuff is as "sterile" as homemade jam. I don't inject jam. I don't think many of these poor benighted kids have a good understanding of how dangerous this bullshit is.
Unlike most pieces of cookware, the heating element of a pressure cooker is the gas sealed inside. The same applies to the glass containers inside them.
This becomes interesting if you view thermal energy as kinetic energy on a molecular level. Basically in a sealed system superheated gas molecules impact stable solids and liquids like cell walls and RNA of bacteria at increasing speeds shredding them and destabilizing them. The gas trapped under the surface of liquids then acts a sort of auger. It ejects the liquid and the bacteria suspended in it upward into an area with more surface area relative to the superheated gas which further shreds and destabilizes bacterial cell walls and RNA. Then as the ejected liquid hits the larger liquid pool it rapidly cools stabilizing the bacterial components by putting them back together wrong. This happens over and over again until you are left with a malformed soup of bacteria.
In normal cookware your gas molecules escape before they become this devastating, but in a pressure cooker pressure is directly proportional to temperature as per the ideal gas law. So your gas molecules got hotter and hotter, faster and faster, until anything inside is caught in a figurative sandstorm on a molecular level.
Edit: Just so you know Jam has other properties that make it difficult for bacteria to grow in it. If you are adding sugar to it and removing water until it becomes near super saturated, it becomes difficult for bacteria to survive in it. Bacterial cell walls are not impenetrable, and since the jam is more pressurized on a molecular level the molecules in the jam will penetrate those walls, and fill them. Think of it like a reverse balloon. Fun fact, in the early days of COVID when smaller NEMA filters were unavailable a proposed solution was using condensed salt solution on a lesser filter. The logic was salt crystals would reform inside of the virus and shred it like sugar on bacteria in Jam. Didn't work, but interesting idea.
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