Testing some expired iodine stuff

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2021-05-28 08:30:15

I got to looking at my "prepper" sorts of supplies recently, and found I had some well-out-of-date iodine products -- out of date enough that back when I bought them the movement was called "survivalist" rather than "prepper". So out of curiosity I decided to test them to see whether they were still any good.

The first item was a little bottle of pills for sterilizing water, Coghlans brand, containing tetraglycine hydroperiodide. The bottle had 50 pills, with "8 mg titratable iodine" each. These bottles are date coded, and this one was from 1999. (For reference, the first three or four digits on the code stamped on the bottle are month and year.) The manufacturer says that an unopened bottle of these pills lasts at least four years, but this was twenty.

Now, I once had a bottle of iodine water disinfection pills that went bad after a few years, despite never having been opened. It was easy to tell that it had gone bad: the metal bottle cap had disintegrated and its surroundings were stained with iodine. Iodine is hard to contain: it diffuses through plastics and oxidizes metals. Glass works well, but it's hard to make an enclosure entirely out of glass, though chemists do in fact do so for exactly this purpose; they're called ampoules, and the YouTube chemist known as Nile Red has a nice video on how to make them. If you want your iodine stuff to last indefinitely, that's how to package it.

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