– If you have to have specific ingredients in your disinfectant wipes/sprays to clean off unwanted contamination by health organizations – why is anything under the category of ‘hand soap’ considered effective for washing your hands?
In: Biology
Disinfectant wipes and sprays work in a completely different method than hand soaps, so the necessary ingredients are different.
Soaps work because they’re a type of chemical called *surfactants*. They work by lowering the surface tension of water, enabling it to break up and carry off dirt and other materials more effectively. Soaps also usually contain *emulsifiers*, chemicals designed to break up and carry off fats and oils. Taken together, these chemicals in soaps make water more effective at cleaning your hands; you’re quite literally rinsing off contaminants – including viruses and bacteria – and physically getting rid of them.
Surface wipes and sprays, however, are not rinsed off. So they’re not physically removing pathogens. Since that’s the case, they have to outright kill those pathogens rather than simply help you wash them off. Killing a bacterium or inactivating a virus is a lot more difficult than just washing them away because they’re usually pretty tough little things. So, you need specific, fairly powerful chemicals capable of physically disrupting the bacteria and viruses.
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