I hope so too...it's amazingly deceptive advertising on Pristine Blues part IMO. If you go to their website they list their product as a bacteriacide but with an asterix. If you read the asterix at the bottom it just says nonpublic health.
It was far more deceptive before the EPA went through a re-registration of all copper-based algaecide products. Pristine Blue used to claim to be a bactericide, but that was an incorrect claim. Because copper does kill some bacteria, albeit slowly, it can legitimately be claimed to control (i.e. kill faster than they reproduce) bacteria that cause problems not related to human health. For disinfection claims, that requires a much faster kill to help prevent person-to-person transmission of disease and the
EPA DIS/TSS-12 is that standard which chlorine products pass but copper products do not.
So the EPA compromised with industry to let them claim some bactericidal effect but not for public-health bacteria. They can no longer claim to be a disinfectant.
By the way, the EPA DIS/TSS-12 standard requires 6-log reductions in
Escherichia coli in 30 seconds or less and 6-log reductions in
Enterococcus faecium in 2 minutes or less. This is roughly equivalent to what 0.4 ppm FC with no CYA at a pH of 7.5 can do. Note this is a rather extreme standard and does not take into account CYA. Products with CYA passed the test because the test starts out with water with no CYA in it and Trichlor and Dichlor don't add enough CYA to be a problem. In water without CYA, 1 ppm FC of Trichlor with it's 0.6 ppm CYA added is equivalent to 0.77 ppm FC with no CYA while 1 ppm FC of Dichlor with it's 0.9 ppm CYA added is equivalent to 0.65 ppm FC with no CYA. This is in part why the minimum FC level for these products is 1 ppm.
The minimum FC/CYA level we recommend on this forum to prevent algae growth is equivalent to around 0.06 ppm FC with non CYA so is around 6-7 times lower than the EPA DIS/TSS-12 level. It is still a fast kill and in practice commercial/public pools with far lower FC/CYA ratios don't get outbreaks or reported disease transmission issues so the EPA limit is too extreme. For commercial/public pools a reasonable ratio might be 20% or perhaps not lower than 10%. For residential pools, the risks are much lower so if it weren't for algae prevention, an FC/CYA ratio in the 2-3% range would be reasonable enough for disinfection and also oxidation of bather waste in such low bather-load pools.
