I hate Poison Oak

Since the HIV virus attacks helper T-cells, persons afflicted with the deadly disease AIDS have a serious deficiency in cellular (T-cell) immunity. AIDS patients may not have problems with poison oak dermatitis and this likely reflects their decreased cellular immunity. In fact, one treatment for AIDS patients is to try to sensitize them to another allergenic chemical (dinitrochlorobenzene) in order to stimulate T-cell production (Striker et al, 1994).

i did read somewhere that deer browse poison oak.

vauron Says:
July 19th, 2009 at 12:57 am

Our neighborhood has a lot of poison oak which I try to avoid, not always successfully. Two days ago I had a major encounter with it that has already brought up rashes on both legs, both arms, front chest and abdomen, face, and privates.
As usual I got some more Zanfel, which I’ve found reasonably effective in the past in preventing the rashes from reaching the blistering stage provided I apply it several times. Given the area I’d need to cover this time, times the number of applications typically needed, it looked like I’d be up for at least a couple of tubes of the stuff!
At $40 per one-ounce tube I figured it might be interesting to experiment a bit. So I bought only one tube of Zanfel, and for comparison mixed an ounce of Gynol II (as a source of nonoxynol-9, cost $15 for 3.8 oz) with 2 oz of GOJO Orange (I had a 4.7 liter container of it in the house that I’d bought some time ago from Costco, but it’s not expensive: Amazon sells a 14 oz. container of it for $4 plus shipping).
I applied the Zanfel to my right arm, right leg, the left side of my abdomen, and the right side of my chest (to mix things up a bit), following the instructions to the letter. I then applied the G+G mixture to the matching half of me, following the same procedure. I also treated my face etc. but not in so systematic a way, I just wanted their puffiness to go down.
As usual the Zanfel relieved the itching immediately. The GG did so too, with no perceptible difference between the two. After an hour the itching had returned and I applied both again, with a similar effect.
After four applications of each the itching was mostly gone from my arms and legs, though my abdomen was still red and a bit itchy. The remaining few itches on my arms and legs were partly in the Zanfel-treated area and partly in the GG-treated area. If I had to tell them apart I’d say the Zanfel-treated areas were slightly itchier, but that could be explained by having more PO in those areas (the PO seemed spread all around but I couldn’t tell how uniformly).
Whatever advantage the Zanfel has over my improvised GG mixture doesn’t seem to be so striking as to justify costing more than twenty times as much. While I’ve gone through most of the Zanfel tube, I seem to have a lifetime supply of GG left over, at half the cost of the Zanfel.
I guess my next experiment is to see whether the Gynol II was needed. While it’s much cheaper than Zanfel it’s considerably more expensive than GOJO Orange. On the other hand even if it only has some sort of placebo effect it might be worth keeping as part of the recipe.
Yet another experiment would be to compare GOJO Orange with the recipe paxpeg just tried, baking soda and dish detergent. Conceivably any mixture of scrubbing agent (Zanfel’s polyethylene granules, GOJO’s powdered pumice, paxpeg’s baking soda) and detergent/surfactant, applied sufficiently often and sufficiently vigorously, might remove the bulk of the urushiol. All these competing mystical remedies might come down to just scraping and dissolving and scraping and dissolving until most of the nasty stuff is gone.