What are the 0.01% of germs that hand sanitizers can’t kill?
In: Chemistry
Well, first off the 99.99% or similar claims are meaningless and only serve as a marketing gimmick.
The number comes from their own tests in a highly specific laboratory conditions which doesn’t translate to the real world. So they can put that number on their products but what does it mean for you?
It means that they are not guaranteeing that they will kill all your germs, and that’s because it’s virtually impossible. Hands in general are pretty good in retaining germs on them, and when we talk about germs we could be talking about billions of germs.
Those two factors make it extremely hard, practically impossible to kill all of them from your hands, even if you do it over and over again. So you’ll never really be able to kill all of the germs on your hands, hence the not-100% claim (and in the real world, it’s also not going to come close to the claimed percentage either).
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