Sunlight: A Substitute to Hydrogen Peroxide and Monosodium Glutamate as a Bleaching Agent in Bone Bleaching

Abstract

Sunlight, which consists of photons emanating from the suns core, is abundant in various parts of the world especially in the tropics where this experiment was carried out. The experiment was carried out in other to appraise the bleaching effect of sunlight on various animal skeletons as compared to hydrogen peroxide and monosodium glutamate which are conventional bleaching agents. The skeletons were divided into four groups: Group one- whose skeleton was bleached with sunlight, Group two- whose skeleton was bleached with monosodium glutamate, Group three- whose skeleton was bleached with hydrogen peroxide and group four- whose skeleton was unbleached at all. Group two, three and four served as the standard to study the level of whiteness of the bones bleached by group one. The animals from group one and four were killed in a humane way by carbon dioxide asphyxiation, after which they were defleshed with a scalpel and macerated in boiling detergent for an hour. The animals were then defattened with kerosene and then separated; with group four kept away from sunlight and group one spread under the sun for a week. After which they were then compared under a white bulb florescence light with the skeletons of animals from group two and group three earlier prepared and bleached with monosodium glutamate and hydrogen peroxide respectively. Our preliminary observation showed that sunlight had a strong bleaching effect on the skeletons, and this effect competed favorably with the skeletons bleached with hydrogen peroxide and monosodium glutamate. By these preliminary observations, sunlight may economically and functionally replace hydrogen peroxide and monosodium glutamate in biomedical analysis and osteological preparation.