If hand sanitizer kills 99.9% of germs, what stops us from using that all of the time instead of hand washing?
In: Biology
The single most life saving discovery in the history of medical science is hot soapy water. There is little need to be concerned about killing all of the germs, which is impossible, when you can just wash them off of you. In a modern city that would be sending live germs into the sanitary sewer system where there is a extremely low risk of someone being there to be harmed by them.
I can think of two reasons. Hand sanitizer dries out the hands and doesn’t remove physical grime as effectively. Thus, proper hand-washing keeps your hands healthier and cleaner.
Most importantly (imo) is hand sanitizer does not kill the Norovirus which is responsible for most stomach illness.
Personally, hand sanitizer dries my skin out so much to the point where it cracks and bleeds. so i never use it.
Lots of good points on here, but noone has mentioned the fact that bacteria, viruses and microbes on our hands that we can kill with hand sanitiser also make waste- so we can kill the cells but the only way to get rid of the waste is by washing.
This occurred to me in relation to another thread (sorry don’t have the link) discussing why it’s safe to cut the mould off a piece of cheese and eat the good but, but not bread- the mould makes waste that contaminates the bread as its soft but not the cheese as its hard. (Or something like) the waste products are more harmful than the mould. So surely the waste products of germs on the skin are also harmful
Sanitizer doesn’t ‘clean’ your hands. If you have dirt all over them and sanitize, then you have “relatively” germ free, dirty hands.
Hand sanitizer doesn’t remove dirt and oil from your skin, even if it does kill germs just like (proper) hand washing
Killing is not the same as removing. Also oils and dirt aren’t living. All that crap just stays on your hands.
If I accidentally get dogshit on my hand, I don’t want to just have sanitized dogshit on my hand. I want soap and water to wash it away.
There’s more dogshit out in the world than we want to know about.
Hand sanitizer contains chemicals that are toxic to many plants and animals. We don’t want to be putting a lot of it down our drains where it goes into the oceans and hurts wildlife. In nature we need bacteria so we don’t want a lot of this in nature.
We also need bacteria on our skin. The sanitizer kills all bacteria allowing the harmful to thrive. Keeping a good balance on the skin is important.
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