Preservatives for Industrial Materials1

A wide variety of materials used in manufactured items are subject to microbiological deterioration. Those materials which are of chief concern include textiles and cordage, paper, leather, paints, plastics and plasticizers, rubber, waxes, and wood. The organisms responsible for microbiological deterioration, their mode of attack, and effects on materials, have been reviewed (Greathouse et al., 1951; Greathouse aild Wessel, 1954). The preservatives commonly in use today are chiefly organic compounds or metallo-organic compounds which are either incorporated into a material during its manufacture or applied as an after-treatment to manufactured material. Of the limited number of practical fungicides, there are instances when many of these compounds have undesirable properties such as deteriorating influences on rubber or other materials, color, toxicity to handlers, cost, or lack of permanence. The chief nonclinical uses for antibiotics are for agricultural purposes (Leben and Keitt, 1954; Croxall, 1956; Lees, 1956; Rhodes, 1956) in preventing plant infections and in the field of food preservation (Wrenshall, 1957). There is almost no published literature on the use of antibiotics for the prevention of fungal deterioration of manufactured materials. The fact that certain antibiotics are effective against microorganisms at low concentrations, and may be safe for handling of treated materials insofar as skin irritation problems are concerned, makes them of special interest in deterioration problems. Those antibiotics reported to have good antifungal properties, as well as some antibiotics available only recently, were selected in order to determine their effectiveness in fungusproofing several representative types of manufactured materials in preliminary tests.