1y ago

First (I repeat, first) test of menstrual products using actual blood published last week (I repeat, last week)

mastodon.social Bethany Black (@BethanyBlack@mastodon.social)

After all these years I’m rarely surprised by medical misogyny, but finding out that the research from the first ever tests on period products using blood instead of water were published LAST WEEK is one of those surprises.

Archive link to story here: https://archive.ph/HVNLH

Posted here because there is no community for Absolutely Infuriating (that I know of).

57 comments

Not The Onion is probably the closest because of how ridiculous this is.
- Good call. Would anyone like to crosspost it? I don't want to spam the same link myself (because I dislike it when others do).
  
  Much appreciated!

When I read that news I was shocked too.
How possibly nobody tested with even animal blood?
Water and blood have different consistency and fluidity
- Why kill animals? It's not like menstrual products don't work. just keep buying the stuff that works more than others if the little difference between the testing fluids and blood are really existent.
  And it's not like the products would be better with blood testing. That's not how capitalism works. It needs to work good enough to be bought with the biggest profit margin possible. So using blood for testing just creates suffering for animals for no reason other than you can put "tested with animal blood" on the box. I wouldn't see that as a plus
  
  Who said to kill animals just for this purpose? That would be irresponsible and incredibly asshole
  The industry is already dumping too much animal blood as a waste, just take a small drop from something that otherwise goes in wastewater anyway
  
  We already kill thousands of animals a day, would it be so hard to save some blood instead of throwing it away?
  I think the bigger problem is it may be unsanitary/a biohazard.

Have they just been using that stupid blue water from the commercials this whole time?!

20% of my infuriation came from this terribly (I repeat, terribly) written title.

I imagine that its extremely hard to get the mass quantities of blood you need for actual testing.
- Maybe, maybe not. Blood stocks are precious but they do go out of date and blood banks would jump at the chance to do something useful with the wastage. It would also be perfectly possible to do RCTs with actual women. At the very least, it would be possible to produce a liquid with the right sort of viscosity instead of using water or saline. It's just so ridiculously shit.
  
  It sounds like nobody actually wanted to test with actual blood - not that there were technical or logistical difficulties, because if this was any other industrial problem, solutions would have been found the second time the problem showed up.
  I don't understand what the concerns against using real blood were. Was it expensive? Government regulated? It could have atleast had animals blood testing or something, or are we suddenly balking at all the butchering in the food industries now too?
  I don't agree with testing with real women though. That's pretty much the same as saying skincare should be tested on real people, right? It should be TESTED elsewhere, and USED by women.
- We’ve got enough to make sausages with it.
  
  I don't think that would be an appropriate test either.
  
  And bacon too
  
  Get out.
- I'm still not satisfied because menstrual blood is much chunkier than a donated pint from your arm. Until they're using mucus blood we're still in the dark ages.
  
  Absolutely. Menstrual blood is its own beast altogether. I often found that the mucus heavy days was a real blocker to actual absorbsion and often there would be a still dry but slimy tampon removed at some points.
  
  Yes, menstrual fluid includes tissue. It's not just simple blood.
  
  Eh - it depends on the test.
  Laboratory tests for pure absorbency makes sense for blood volume.
  Functional absorbency is always going to be so much more nuanced as each woman has multiple factors in play. You're better off calibrating pure absorbency first, then carrying those results forward to study and understand functional usage.
  
  But how on earth would you get period blood?
- Still cheaper than printer ink
  zing
- If you're using human blood, yes. Plenty of pig and cow blood out there, though.
  
  They use it to test washing machines!
  
  And I'm not sure about the cow stuff, but pig blood is almost completely identical to human blood down to the molecular level, so shouldn't present many if any aberrations when compared to real life intended use!

It's been a while since I was actually surprised by a post. There you have it.

what the fuck??

Testing is important. Next it should be done with adhesive bandage.

I mean there's probably a fuck ton of additional work that would need to be done to test with real blood. Like just the paperwork and health and safety stuff would make it not worth while. Then there's sourcing it, the ethics, the potential of protest from anti-animal testing groups etc.
- 4 billion people, affected 5 days a month, for 40 years.
  Nah, you're right - not worth the paperwork.
  I mean, the ridiculousness of the disparity is highlighted in the article: we have a standardised measure for hot sauce, but not menstrual product absorbency.
  
  My wife is pregnant. In her last month now. The discomfort and sacrifices woman go through... I've been joking that if it were men being the ones going through pregnancy, we would've perfected incubating the fetus in a machine or something decades ago. Also, 12 months of paid paternity leave, at the minimum. I'm not sure I'm joking...
- They're billion dollar products, they absolutely could be made to test them if anyone cared enough to make them produce accurate labelling. If we can do it with food, we can do it with sanitary products. The NHS could do it, if it wanted to. It does plenty of independent trials to check up on how badly Pharma is lying to them this time.
  
  Yeah, of course they could but im just saying there are reasons why they don't

Did anyone have access to the original publication and can tell me, if they explain how they determined it being the first study and what other liquids have been used before in studies? The Guardian article only says "Manufacturers have traditionally used saline or water", but that does not tell you much, as these are not scientists with independent studies and manufacturers usually do not publish their full internal testing methods.
I only have access to its abstract and curiously it does not mention it being the first published study with actual blood, so the authors themselves did not find it very noteworthy.
I can easily imagine, that a published, standardized, reproducible (model) menstrual fluid for such an analysis does not exist yet, but I am not that involved in medical publishing. If this is the case, that would be really infuriating. It might exist as some vendors sell artificial menstrual fluid.
- Red blood cell capacity of modern menstrual products: considerations for assessing heavy menstrual bleeding
  No study exists comparing the capacity of currently available menstrual hygiene products using blood.
  They don't have to explain how they know. Literature searches are standard, and done before doing research like this. Funders want to know if they're wasting their money on a question that has already been answered, and whether the proposed methods are appropriate given what has been done, and learnt, before.
  That's not to say that all literature searches are perfect. You can check on PubPeer for any howls of anguish from unacknowledged researchers. But the only legal requirement for testing is tampons due to toxic shock syndrome and its relationship to absorbency. It's really unlikely that manufacturers are doing the tests without being forced to and, if they have done any, really unlikely they would fail to publish their results if they liked the results. If they are suppressing unwelcome results, the research might as well not exist.

That's bleedin disgustin ainit.

57 comments