Use
The main application of sodium chlorite is the generation of chlorine dioxide for bleaching and stripping of textiles, pulp, and paper. It is also used for disinfection of a few municipal water treatment plants after conversion to chlorine dioxide. An advantage in this application, as compared to the more commonly used chlorine, is that trihalomethanes (such as chloroform) are not produced from organic contaminants. Chlorine dioxide generated from sodium chlorite is approved by FDA under some conditions for disinfecting water used to wash fruits, vegetables, and poultry.
Sodium chlorite, NaClO2, sometimes in combination with zinc chloride, also finds application as a component in therapeutic rinses, mouthwashes, toothpastes and gels, mouth sprays, as a teat dip for control of mastitis in dairy cattle, as preservative in eye drops, and in contact lens cleaning solution under the trade name Purite.
Under the brand name Oxine it is used for sanitizing air ducts and HVAC/R systems and animal containment areas (walls, floors, and other surfaces).
Neuraltus Pharmaceuticals is investigating a drug that they refer to as NP001 for treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Some people with ALS have concluded that NP001 is a formulation of sodium chlorite, and are ordering the chemical and self-dosing outside of any scientific study. Preliminary results suggest that this sodium chlorite treatment is less effective than NP001.
Read more about this topic: Sodium Chlorite
Famous quotes containing the word use:
“... it is use, and use alone, which leads one of us, tolerably trained to recognize any criterion of grace or any sense of the fitness of things, to tolerate ... the styles of dress to which we are more or less conforming every day of our lives. Fifty years hence they will seem to us as uncultivated as the nose-rings of the Hottentot seem today.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)