Why is water and soap better than hand sanitizer?
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It’s like you sprayed your car with lysol everytime you got it dirty instead of rinsing it away. It would build up over time. It wouldn’t be full of germs but it would still be built up over itself instead of removed.
Soaps bind to the fatty protective casing of many germs to disassemble and dehydrate the germ. The alcohols in sanitizer are less effective in this regard.
They do different jobs. Well, kind of, they’ll both kill any bacteria on your hands, however only soap and water will remove physical dirt. I.e. if your hands are muddy use soap and water as alcohol gel wouldn’t get them clean. If your hands appeared visibly clean then sanitiser will steralise them, but so would antibacterial soap and water
I’m not sure exactly how far down the rabbit hole I should go, so I’ll just go all the way and you can skip whatever you already know. Oil and water don’t mix. That is, you can’t dissolve one in the other. Water is a polar molecule, which means the electrons are concentrated slightly more on one side of the molecule than the other. Just like a magnet has North and South magnetic poles, the water molecule has positive and negative electric “poles” so we call it polar. Polar solvents can dissolve polar solutes. Oil, however, is nonpolar and won’t dissolve in water.
Hand sanitizer uses either ethanol or isopropanol as it’s bacteria-killing agent most commonly. Both are polar molecules which dissolve in water. If you have oil or grease on your hands, it will not mix with the hand sanitizer. Even if it did, you do not wash away the grime, you put it on your hands, rub it around a bit, then let it evaporate.
Soap is an interesting molecule. It is a bit longer with one end that looks and acts very similar to a polar molecule, and the other end looks and acts like a non-polar molecule. I think, logically that means it is technically polar overall, but the tail is far enough from the head that the polarity doesn’t affect interactions down there. This means it can bind well with the oil and grease on your hand, but also with the water used to wash it away. Not all soap is antibacterial, but even if it isn’t, they will mostly get washed away too. Plus, the cell wall of bacteria is also fatty like oil. The soap can bind with it and actually molecularly disassemble the bacteria. Sort of, indirectly killing it. I don’t know how likely this is and how much of an effect it plays overall, but I have heard that it is possible before, and it makes sense to me.
One other thing to consider, some people are scared of creating super bugs that will be resistant to antibiotics. Anti-bacterial hand soap does use antibiotics. Whereas alcohol is already lethal to bacteria, so no additives needed. And I’m quite certain they can’t grow immune to alcohol… At least not without DRASTIC changes to their entire structure.
Hand sanitizer kills the germs, but leaves all their dead bodies (and its own residue) on your hands. Nothing is actually *removed*.
Soap and water physically removes stuff from your hands and washes it away down the sink, leaving the hands cleaner after than using sanitizer alone.
imagine your hands covered with dirt, and then you sterilize them using alcohol or lysol spray. when you lick your fingers afterwards you’d still be eating lots of dirt. and not all of the dirt would be sterilized, so you might get sick.
what about soap and water instead? you’d wash the dirt off your hands and into the sink. lick your fingers after, don’t taste dirt but maybe some soap residue?
germs that you can’t see are just like the dirt that you can see. would you rather wash them off your hands, or just disinfect your hands and transfer the dirt (germs) everywhere? the best answer is to only use sanitizer when soap and water aren’t readily available.
A couple reasons.
soap and water remove visible dirt. Sanitizer does not.
both require that you rub your hands together for a few seconds because that breaks up the membranes on the germs. You also have to wash all surfaces of your hands, and most people take more time and are more thorough with both at the sink. (Seriously, watch people using sanitizer some time. A lot of them won’t even get the backs of their hands. Fewer will get under/around nails)
Most people using sanitizer aren’t even using a sufficient quantity of the product.
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