Wandering Adventure Party

The full paper is here and, as usual, it’s hardly anything and decontextualized in order to get a publishable result.

This one is so bad that it doesn’t use established baselines or do any form of statistical analysis on the results instead opting for their own “baseline” measurements using very small sample sizes. It also plays a smoke and mirrors game where it shows a result for short term immunological response and then uses that to insinuate the ‘slightly reduced but still likely well within the error of the poor control’ long term effects are worth noting.

Other major flaws:

• As others have mentioned, mice are a terrible model for this as their skin is very thin and proper tattooing is near impossible.
• They mention verifying with human cadavers but don’t include any data from those.
• There was no control group, the baseline was an untreated mouse, not one with an acute foot trauma.
• Mice age very quickly, best I can tell the immunological markers weren’t age controlled. 2 months out of a <2 year lifespan is a lot of aging. Again, if there was a proper control to measure against.
• The obsfucation of the raw data into cheesy and unreadable box and whisker plots is hella suspicious.

At best it’s a very poorly communicated and poorly designed experiment but I suspect that’s due to it result hunting.

The implications are the variables are conflated and the conclusions are overblown.

It should come as no surprise that acute trauma and injecting a foreign substance would cause a relatively significant immunological response. The issue is that for the “chronic phase”, which is where the novelty of this research lies, the evidence shown is far from difinitive compared to the story being told and what results are shown aren’t overly significant.

Even if you 100% believe the paper the conclusion is that the effect of getting tattooed is, arguably, similar to catching the flu once. However, the paper itself tried to obfuscate that so they have a more impactful result and the marketing/outreach/media site that was linked here doubles down on it trying to sell the story of “tattoos==illness and death”!!!

Boiling water isn’t enough to kill a lot of hardier bacteria and fungal spores and so it’s certainly not “sterilized”, though it may be ‘sterile enough’ for your purposes. Water just can’t get hot enough and the “shells” are well insulated enough to survive for hours in those conditions.

However, they also become tougher once dehydrated and so simply placing them in a really hot stove has the same issue.

You simultaneously need more heat, pressure, time, and possibly some form of chemical attack to truly “sterilize” something.

Using a pressure cooker and a tiny amount of alcohol, ethanol, is usually enough to do the trick.

Potassium Metabisulfite

If you have it, it sounds like it’s a better option than whatever easy ethanol source you’ve got. But the trick to proper sterilization is that certain microbes are resistant to different things. The Potassium Metabisulfite sounds like it’s about as nasty, but less toxic, than bleach. However even that alone isn’t enough for sterility.

Glassware is usually fine so long as you allow pressure to build and release slowly.

For what you’re doing there are additional microorganisms which can outcompete anything you don’t kill and so “sterile enough” is probably fine, but putting this here as something to keep in mind in case things go wrong.

Oh honey… This is barely below average.