If hand sanitizer kills 99.9% of germs, what stops us from using that all of the time instead of hand washing?
In: Biology
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.
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.
Because excessive use of antibacterials and sanitizing can accelerate the development of resistant strains.
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?
Because if there’s poop on your hands, sanitizer will kill 99% of the germs in that poop. But there will _still be poop_ on your hands.
Because body oils and stains aren’t made of germs. Dirt isn’t made of germs and almost nothing except your digestive track, the microbe bug eggs in food and everything. And living organisms in the consumable matter in the air. Is.
Germs are just living vehicles. What gets you sick is a persons weak ass immune system. If your immune system is compromised it leads to health issues.
Essentially looking at it. All hand sanitizer does is kill nutrients in your body by killing the process for it to get to your digestion. The living organisims in your body probably die off and are allergic to it. If something is a virus, sanitizer will only annoy it. Sanitizer can not kill infections or a virus or anything that’s at a cognitive level above base germs. Penicillin does.
So why not wipe Penicillin all over your body like sun screen? It would be more effective. Equally as weird.
It could kill 99.9%. But it rarely does.
The claim assumes an absurdly long exposure period. Like 3minutes to achieve maximum sanitization. You would need to bathe in the stuff.
Not that 20seconds is worthless, but its not 99.9% effective either.
Why are you assuming that germs are a bad thing? Fun fact, germs are on virtually every surface that you touch.
Sanitisers and cleaners are two entirely different things.
A sanitiser will kill bacteria and viruses.
A cleaner (such as soap) will remove dirt and grease.
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