My mother just forwarded an email to all her contacts (thanks, mom), warning us of the dangers of mixing Lysol and bleach together. Here's most the content, translated from French:
Bleach and Lysol, a lethal mix
If the experience of my friend can be of any help... Read her email!
Here is my latest bad experience that I want to share with you. It might be useful to you. On January 2nd 2011, I was finishing to wash the previous evening's dishes when I had family come over for dinner. As I was finishing, I thought of using a bit of bleach to disinfect the sink.
Since I had very little bleach left, I went to fetch my Lysol and poured the bleach I had left with the Lysol. This was a terrible mix that you should never attempt to recreate. Two minutes later, I could barely breathe and thirty minutes later I was at the hospital where I received care from the ambulance and at the hospital.
The doctor told me that it would have taken very little more for me pass away. An accident by lack of knowledge can happen quite fast and can sometimes be lethal.
As a general rule, I'm skeptical of whatever I read in chain mails so I googled excerpts of the text. Unsurprisingly, I found an almost exact match as the first search result. The only difference is that the year changed, from 2011 in the email I received to 2009 on the blog page so it's undoubtedly a chain letter. By the way, that page is also the first result when you google "eau de javel lysol" ("bleach lysol", in French).
A search on the web returns unhelpful results, with the average content farms contradicting each other and offering no trustworthy source.
As any chemist would know, bleach is sodium hypochlorite and, from a quick search, it would seem the active agent in Lysol is benzalkonium chloride but I can't find anything on the interaction of those two compounds either. From a quick look at the two compounds, I would be surprised to see any spectacular interaction between the two of them though.
So, does anyone know what happens when you mix Lysol and bleach?
