Breast Feeding and Ethiduim Bromide - Can you make agarose gels? (Sep/01/2010 )

This baby boom is hitting hard our small lab I do get that pregnant women are not allowed to work with agarose gels (due ethidium bromide (mutagenetic)), but now suddenly we have a woman who is brestfeeding and says she can't make gels or even be in the same room with the ethidium bromide. I have tried googling and everything, but can't find any information, every single website is only talking about pregnant women. Is half of our lab going to be handicapped for the next few years?

No idea where to put this... but the baby boom is hitting hard our small lab I do get that pregnant women are not allowed to work with agarose gels (due ethidium bromide (mutagenetic)), but now suddenly we have a woman who is brestfeeding and says she can't make gels or even be in the same room with the ethidium bromide. I have tried googling and everything, but can't find any information, every single website is only talking about pregnant women. Is half of our lab going to be handicapped for the next few years?

I think she is being over the top. I too have searched for info on EtBr in the past and have found nothing to warrant that big a concern. Having said that, I don't think you can make her if she doesn't want to- nor should you. Why not just switch your lab over the Gelred or something similar?

We are talking about changing... and I don't think anyone is making her to work in the room if she doesn't want to, but at the same time, I spend half of the last week doing gels while the technician was on holiday. Now the technician is back, but she is suddenly too busy and she is asking basically me to help... and my time is limited I hate saying no, but I can't spend half of my working time helping others out. If there is no real reason for that at least I don't have to feel bad about not helping her out and adjusting my schedule for their experiments.

I would suggest you gelred or something similar as well.
And if the extra workload because of your baby boomers is getting too much for the technicians and other lab members to handle you/the technicians/whoelse need to tell the boss to get to one table to clarify this! You can help the others sometimes, but its not your task to do all thier dull labwork (because especially the boring and labour intensive work is delegated).

Thanks Now I heard it was our technician's theory that making agarose gels is not allowed and told the woman not to do them None else in the lab has ever heard about it... but then again, our technician also told me stop wasting nitrile gloves while handling methanol I told the woman to double check from the uni's doctor what she can do and cannot do and our boss... well, I just solved yesterday one problem by making two minute phone call which we have tried to solve for one year I'm leaving the lab in the end of the year. Maybe I should be pregnant the remaining time too

Well, I guess as breast milk does have shed cells and immune cells in it, there is some very small (infinetismal I would have thought) risk of passing a mutation on to a breast-fed child. I would have thought that there is unlikely to be any "free" EtBr on the body unless the person mamanges to get a large amount on themselves.

I believe many been misinformed about the dangers of ethidium bromide. This is a substance used by untold numbers of researchers in tens of thousands of labs around the world daily for decades -- can you find a single instance of it causing anyone any trouble?

Have a read here and here.

Follow the MSDS sheets which specify how to handle the reagent. All lab reagents pose some degree of hazard. As long as proper guidelines are followed there should be no problem. the institution must provide the appropriate safety equipment, training, qualifications, and policies for everyone not just the employee in question.

Frankly, IMHO is not EtBr they should be afraid of, but rather the microwave oven they use to make the agarose gel.
For EtBr substitution, there is one supplier suggest me to try GenedireX NOVEL JUICE .