If hand sanitizer kills 99.9% of germs, what stops us from using that all of the time instead of hand washing?
In: Biology
Hand sanitizer kills the creatures in the cesspool, but it’s now a cesspool with even more bodies for the next batch of creatures to feast on.
Soap removes the creatures and the substances in the cesspool.
Google kid’s experiments with soap/water, sanitizer, and nothing using sliced bread in ziploc bags.
“Moldy bread experiment”
Wash your hands.
Also, I doubt everyone uses hand sanitizer correctly. Pretty much everyone I know always uses far too little sanitizer. It should take about 20 seconds of hand rubbing for the sanitizer to be dried.
Because excessive use of antibacterials and sanitizing can accelerate the development of resistant strains.
A few dodgy answers on this thread.
Hand sanitiser is very good at killing most bacteria and viruses and actually better for the skin on your hands than washing with soap and water if you’re cleaning your hands regularly. There are a few specific bacteria that hand sanitiser cannot kill, however, due to their structure. Usually these are found in faeces or soil.
I work in a hospital and the recommendation is to use hand sanitiser except in a few specific circumstances (your hands are visibly dirty, you’ve been to the bathroom, or a patient has an infection with a bacteria which is known to not be susceptible to sanitiser).
There’s now even a surgical scrub which surgeons use before surgery (instead of scrubbing with antiseptic soap) which is essentially just sanitiser and is approved for use as the sole scrub.
Out and about in general life, your hands get visibly dirty and you’re washing your hands more after going to the bathroom- so this is why you probably need to use soap and water. However in a hospital we are cleaning our hands almost every minute – they don’t get visibly dirty, it’s just because we are moving between patients and rooms. So we use hand sanitiser 95% of the time because it’s just as good at killing bacteria and its quicker, easier, and better for your skin.
Tldr hand sanitizer is good unless you’re hands are dirty or you’ve gone to the bathroom
Another Explanation, is that bacteria will adapt to hand sanitizer over time, while washing your hand is also a mechanical process and is much harder for bacteria to resist.
So when you have a choice, wash your hand, if not, use hand sanitizer.
PS: When I say resist, it’s more like survival bias, only the bacteria that survive hand sanitizer (0.1%) will stay on your hand and multiply.
Hand washing cleans more than sanitizer because it gets rid of nasty stuff that’s not just germs. If you have poop smeared on your hands, would you prefer soap+hand washing…or hand sanitizer?
Some good points, but I haven’t seen this one come up yet. It’s bad for your skin.
Your skin is *always* covered in germs and other microbes, which are beneficial (or ar least not bad) for you. In what ways our microbiome helps us exactly is still undergoing research, but at least they make it harder for “bad” germs to spread. Using hand sanitizer will kill them off, allowing nasty stuff to spread when you get in contact with it later.
Additionally, hand sanitizer is usually drying out the skin, causing tiny cracks, which potentially help bad germs to hide there or even get inside your body faster.
Only use it occasionally, for example when you are touching a wound. Otherwise soap is better.
It’s not the same as washing your hands. Washing your hands removes dirt, food, germs etc. hand sanitizer might kill germs but it doesn’t clean them off your hands like soap and water.
Hand sanitiser doesn’t work as well when hands are soiled or greasy, and so soap is used because not only does it wash away the dirt and grease but it also breaks down the walls of bacteria and viruses and/or washes them away. Hand sanitizer is only good because of its ease of access due to no need for water and quick action, however soap is usually the better option
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