In case anyone is wondered why there is benzene in hand sanitizer: Ethanol forms an azeotrope with water, which makes it impossible to dry completely without further processing. Benzene forms its own azeotrope with water at an even lower boiling point which allows for cheaply drying ethanol by further distillation; With the, in this case inconvenient, side effect of residual benzene contamination. Now you don't actually need dry ethanol for hand sanitizer, but the production capacity for fuel-grade ethanol is way larger than pharmaceutical or food grade.
The contamination problem in common household products seems like something either the FDA/USDA/EPA should be monitoring.
I can understand someone seeing an opportunity for making cheaper sanitizer and not recognizing the benzene risk they were passing on to customers. Given that this person probably didn't even know they should be testing for benzene - I don't see how the industry could self-regulate benzene presence in hand sanitizers. Even if this became an issue, I wouldn't be surprised to see benzene-free labels slapped on benzene contaminated sanitizer by virtue of incompetence.
Are there any agencies currently tasked with randomly sampling products that consumers come into contact with for contamination?
Self-regulation without any compliance verification is called a polite request.
If people would like to see this sort of thing actually work, that requires real regulation. The kind you see when important people actually care about outcomes, not the PR management you see for, e.g., the food supply.
if any regulation should be enacted, it's to restrict sanitizer use to waste handling, food prep, and healthcare use, which is where it may actually do some good reducing infection transmission, not in everyday activities where it's merely a potentially dangerous evolution-inducing palliative.
instead of regulation, let's just promote soap over sanitizer, which is as effective against pathogens without the unintended side-effects.
Sanitizer is simply inferior to soap. Professionals in waste, food prep, and healthcare should really never use sanitizer, they should just provide sinks and soap.
i actually generally agree with that assessment, although i can see instances where sanitizer can be useful, like changing a series of diapers at a daycare, or servers at a restaurant.
> This isn't an antibiotic,its really hard to imagine microorganisms spontaneously evolving to be resistant to alcohol in the near term.
sensitivity to alcohol has some distribution, but there’s relatively little fitness advantage to being on the low end without the artificial environmental pressure.
Murder a randomly chosen half of people who reach sexual maturity at less than the median height for people doing so at their age for a couple decades and people will “spontaneously evolve” to be taller; and microorganisms have much shorter generations.
> Murder a randomly chosen half of people who reach sexual maturity at less than the median height for people doing so at their age for a couple decades and people will “spontaneously evolve” to be taller; and microorganisms have much shorter generations.
But its pretty unlikely they would develop bullet proof heads in a couple decades, which i think would be the more apt comparison
Alcohol has been used to sanitize since the 1300s. Evolving resistence to alcohol seems like something that would be difficult to do (but not impossible as evidenced by some types of pathogens are resistant). Anyways i think this concern is overblown for alcohol based sanitizer due to the method of action of alcohol. (My opinion on triclosan based sanitizer otoh is totally different)
We see similar patterns in food production and consumer staples. See lead prevalence in baby food, toys, and clothing for examples of other problematic contamination.
>The contamination problem in common household products seems like something either the FDA/USDA/EPA should be monitoring
It is - I believe that literally all imports of hand sanitizer from Mexico are subject to an emergency order requiring sampling/testing because of the prevalence of contaminates
Our high-school chemistry teacher told us that if one ever needs to party in a lab, mix orange juice with the 97% ethanol, but avoid the 99%. The former is distilled with water, but the latter with benzene.
Number of times I have saved someone's life with this trivia: zero, but still hopeful.
To extend the factual data, benzene costs about twice as much as ethanol does (to one sig fig) so its obviously a contamination or production mistake as opposed to a money saving opportunity. Wet ethanol is going to be a little bit cheaper to make than contaminated dry ethanol, so its a mistake or supply demand thing.
As such there is little point in the FDA doing a recall; I thought hand sanitizer went out of style around the time masks came into style. Use by the general public of both seems to have virtually no effect on long term population transmission rate. "Feel good" "keep them busy" activities.
Nature news has a nice article from earlier this year rounding up some of the data and changes in recommendations on the spread of the coronavirus through fomites:
Except that it never seemed to make any sense, even at the time. Early on, we were seeing cases double every three days. It seemed extremely unlikely that that level of transmission could come from surfaces alone. The most reasonable early guess should have been that it's airborne. Yet experts were telling people to wash their hands and NOT wear masks. Maybe they were conflating "no evidence of airborne transmission" with "evidence of no airborne transmission"? And we were told not to wear masks, yet we also needed to make sure that health care workers had PPE. But if masks were bad for us, why were they necessary for them? Maybe they wanted to conserve limited supply for the front line?
Fauci more or less came out and said that the CDC's public recommendations at that time were not based on the science available to them, but were an action-driven measure to preserve the available PPE supplies for healthcare workers, as in the depths of the early pandemic they were dangerously depleted.
To put it another way, they lied to the public to keep the masks where they could do the most good.
You can equivocate about what is "enough evidence" that masks are effective and whether that threshold had been reached yet (you can always collect more evidence, but when people are dying it's not bad to make some guesses that it probably is airborne/aerosol and masks will help). But the Surgeon-General went as far as to claim that the science showed that masks were not effective. That the science was in and it showed that masks did not prevent transmission among the general public - which is different from "not enough evidence to conclusively say yet".
The USG's actions here were medically unethical - they misrepresented the benefits and dangers of an intervention in order to manipulate the patient's behavior. Maybe it's justifiable under the circumstances but at best it's shady.
I think under a different president it probably would have gone differently. But it doesn't change the responsibilities of the medical professionals involved here - you don't get to abdicate your ethical vows just because the president tells you to.
It's just so incredibly bad. People stop believing the CDC. I have. Without solid evidence what the CDC say is not something to take account of. I can't really get too upset about anti-vaxxers believing what I consider to be dangerous (to all of us) nonsense.
At some point you can't understand all the evidence for some given proposition. That's a different point for each of us depending on what we've studied, the proposition etc. At some point we have to rely on some kind of authority in the belief that they won't tell lies because if they did there would be dire consequences for the people involved. Even when we check the evidence we don't personally check the lab to see if the evidence is faked.
Anti-vaxxers and their ilk look at current medical experts as the authority and call bullshit. If I can't make an argument from evidence to them because it won't be persuasive to that individual all I can do is say, well yes, but not /this/ time. They wouldn't lie again this time like they did before. But they would if it suited their purpose, they've shown that. So I don't think they have an ulterior purpose this time. Not super convincing is it? So we're left with attacking the anti-vaxxer "science" as BS. From evidence. Which can be difficult to make convincing to some people. Meh. Anti-vaxxers is just one example in one field that shows the effect. There are so many. "They'd even lie to us about how to be safe in a damn pandemic!" Yeah they would. They did.
I'll put an estimate on the marginal impact on loss of life from that masks don't work lie. More than one life lost that would not have been if the lie was not told. More than one is sufficient. Feel free to tighten the estimate to how much more than one.
Fauci, yep. I'd cross the road to avoid him which he wouldn't care about at all as he soaks up the adulation he so clearly craves. It's easy to criticize from the comfort of obscurity under zero pressure compared to what he must have faced but that doesn't mean we must keep silent. To hell with him. He has no business remaining in public life making and influencing decisions because he is a liar of the worst kind. Disagree with me by all means, but if /you/ see that as an attack on the Democrats in favor of Republicans (or Russia, or China) you're not much better yourself when it comes to undermining the credibility of genuine expertise.
Up until around April or so, the CDC was explicitly saying they did not recommend the general public wear masks. For example, here's a tweet from the end of February:
> CDC does not currently recommend the use of facemasks to help prevent novel #coronavirus.
Please note the emphasized word.
The CDC is not saying don't wear masks. The CDC is not saying masks fail to prevent the spread of the virus. The CDC is saying that you wearing a mask is not likely to protect you from catching it.
If you are reading that tweet and interpreting that as "don't wear masks", you are not putting enough emphasis on protecting the people around you.
Except 1. preventing the spread of coronavirus IS preventing it and 2. public health officials explicitly told people not to wear masks:
> “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!” tweeted Dr. Jerome Adams, the U.S. Surgeon General, on Feb. 29. “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!” In an interview with Fox & Friends, Adams said that wearing a mask can even increase your risk of getting the virus. “Folks who don’t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus.”
It’s not incorrect. N95 works. Saying it is unlikely is a flat out lie. And the absurdity of saying that is what broke the trust of the government officials early on the pandemic. It’s a crime for them to have said that.
> Nevertheless, scientists warn against drawing absolute conclusions. “Just because viability can’t be shown, it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t contagious virus there at some point,” says epidemiologist Ben Cowling at the University of Hong Kong.
So, some actions might actually be "feel good" ones but also completely dismissing a possible way of infection is not that wise.
The benzene is the money-saving opportunity. Per GP it's added to avoid a costly drying process. The cost of removing the trace benzene would nullify those savings.
Though 96% ethanol via cheap distillation is fine for hand sanitizer, so the only real explanation is they're leveraging existing supply chains (as described) or have made a mistake.
Even not in a pandemic, the grocery store thing especially makes sense. You'll be touching products that will make it into somebody else's mouth. (Hopefully with a wash in between, but you never know.)
Hand sanitizer drys out skin by removing the protective lipid barrier.
It has not been shown to decrease disease transmission, and there’s good reason to think it increases disease transmission by letting oozy stuff pass in and out of skin.
Put another way, would you rather eat:
- whatever microbes are on a stranger’s hand (probably picked up at the store, and mostly non-pathogenic)
- or whatever toxins are in the hand sanitizer, along with whatever bodily fluids seeped out of said stranger’s dry, cracked skin?
Covid might change the tradeoff a bit, but I’m skeptical.
(USA, pre-pandemic) I've seen "mandatory" hand sanitizer use exactly once, at a camp which had some nasty norovirus outbreaks (which was misery, especially I'm sure for people who had to fight over shared bathrooms).
Now I see it at the entrance of most businesses / by checkout registers.
In a small sampling of places I've been in the MD metro DC area it's not uncommon they have a dispenser at the door, prominently placed to indicate suggested use. A few places have personnel dispensing it, some in a manner that does not suggest it being optional.
In the major metropolitan area in Germany where I live, I've seen this only once at a hairdresser last summer. None of the grocery stores I've been to has required this (though many now offer it)
IME with industrial alcohols, different entities will have different amounts of leeway and with ethanol in particular in the US there are some of the most bizarre regulations.
Natural agricultural ethanol or distilled beverage grade ethanol is highly taxable by numerous agressive collectors so major obstacles to industrial use have long been overcome by _denaturing_ the otherwise natural grain alcohol, by adding a poisonous or disagreeable substance to discourage consumption and therefore avoiding any beverage taxes.
Different denaturants are expected to be used for different end uses of the ethanol, but fundamentally anything (on the list) will do since the primary motivation is taxation/regulatory not function/purpose.
Here is the list, some in the Specially Denatured Alcohol (SDA) category are also approved for personal use by the FDA:
Notice that using plain gasoline (leaded) as well as unleaded for denaturant will introduce some benzene to the ethanol since gasoline almost always contains at least a fraction of a percent benzene naturally.
Also, the alternative _High Octane Denaturant Blend_ for CDA20 would be just fine having up to 1.1 percent benzene:
Now the Acetaldehyde _denaturant_ that could be used to exempt an industrial alcohol from beverage tax is actually often found naturally in lower-grade less-refined agricultural ethanol, so it originates like an ordinary non-beverage solvent. Once this type material arrives in a common bulk fuel terminal, often it will then be further denatured with a few percent of some fairly high-octane gasoline, carefully measured from a nearby tank. Since the Fuel-Grade ethanol they will be distributing has a maximum 2.5 percent additional denaturant allowed, and the gasoline is lower cost per gallon than the raw ethanol.
The final fuel grade ethanol spec allows 0.06 percent benzene or about 600 ppm:
Notice that anhydrous ethanol is not a consideration along this supply chain, up to 1 percent water is allowed in the ethanol that is going to be blended with gasoline for clean-air purposes. Also I was the one who originally proposed the use of method E-1064 for this precision measurement when we were drafting this specification to begin with.
Seems to me like some sanitizer formulators are using fuel-grade ethanol sometimes whether they know it or not, or maybe trying to avoid mere automotive products and using a more carefully specified SDA material.
But a version of SDA28A consisting of highly purified ethanol having only pure Heptane as denaturant could be obtained completely benzene-free, while a different version of SDA28A containing conventional gasoline as denaturant would be expected to contain both benzene and lead.
Almost every chemical factory which had license to Ethanol where I live started making hand sanitizers to meet/exploit the demand last year. Most of them where just white-labeled and so I wouldn't be surprised if there was other harmful substances in it.
Doctors here advise to use soap over hand sanitizers if there's water available. But now there's another problem, all these obsessive hand wash with soap is making the skin dry[1] and causing other skin problems.
Your skin "dries out" because soap removes the natural oils of your skin. The solution is to replace the oils. Coconut oil or olive oil are good choices. A few drops on your still-wet hands, then spread it around by rubbing your hands together; your skin being slightly wet helps spread the oil evenly. The oil will be completely absorbed within a few minutes, so don't worry about having oily hands.
While hand washing is one factor that can cause dry skin, another factor that contributes is ambient humidity. I started keeping my living space between 40 and 50 percent relative humidity, and the dry skin on my hands from frequently washing them went away. Keeping your living environment properly humidified also keeps other parts of your body like mucous membranes hydrated which helps prevent disease, so it's really a win-win.
Anecdotally, I increased hand washing at the start of the pandemic using liquid handwash (containing sodium laureth sulfate), and it caused skin irritation. I switched to plain bar soap (sodium palmate and sodium palm kernelate), which did not.
Oddly enough, my family went the other way. If you live in a hard water area, soap causes soap scum. I banned it from the showers because I was sick of scrubbing out the scum. And it has become impossible to find detergent based bar soap, I think because there's a glut of tallow and lard. So we use liquid body wash now.
I desperately hope this is the case, but a quick google couldn't find a link. Do you happen to have a citation that you'd recommend? I say this as someone who is a bit paranoid about hand cleanliness _and_ is very tired of cracked skin.
Beyond the citation though, it makes logical sense. The mechanism for sanitation is that the soap itself destroys the bacteria. This mechanism works regardless of temperature. Cold water + Soap should be just fine as long as your hands are otherwise visibly clean.
In the food industry, we were required to use high temperature water. This was presumably to remove actual surface contaminants (dirt, grease, other food contaminants) rather than for actual sanitation. That's why you might still see guidelines for using hotter water temperatures.
Does soap actively destroy bacteria, or does it mostly wash the oils off your hands, that bacteria are stuck to/are covered by, and send them down the drain?
I've always been taught it's the latter. Soaping your hands, and not rinsing will not sanitize them, you'll just end up with dirty, soapy hands.
most bacteria have an outer lipid layer that is clung to by the hydrophobic end of soaps and pulled apart by the hydrophilic forces clinging to water on the other end.
Additionally, the soap itself is binding to oils (which often frees up dirt if it was trapping in or under an oily layer, which being hydrophobic will stop water from washing the dirt off). Soap itself doesn’t do a whole lot against dirt.
> Use your preferred water temperature – cold or warm – to wash your hands. Warm and cold water remove the same number of germs from your hands. The water helps create soap lather that removes germs from your skin when you wash your hands. Water itself does not usually kill germs; to kill germs, water would need to be hot enough to scald your hands.
Soap helps break down/encapsulate/dissolve oils/fat that aren't readily soluble in just water.
Which, that breakdown and encapsulation happens faster at higher temperatures - it’s a pretty predictable chemical process. At scalding hot or higher temps, the surfactants can sometimes break down or form weird side products though.
It does happen faster at higher temperatures, but apparently not so much that it makes a difference in terms of cleaning your hands. I'm a bit surprised by that, but that's what studies seem to imply.
Do you have a link to the studies? I definitely notice a huge difference in washing with soap in cold water (camping), which is hard to not leave a film, and warm water which does a pretty effective job quite quickly with the same exact soap.
I didn't encounter any good primary sources, but a few references that seemed to indicate no difference in bacteria reduction between warm/cold water for washing hands. It may be that cold water is simply good enough.
The tricky part here is how the study is constructed. If you take a dry swab with a known bacterial culture, wash in water for x minutes at temp y, and graph it, that might make sense. It just doesn’t reflect real world situations, which almost always involve some kind of biofilm, oil/grease, dirt or similar mass in a complex interaction.
Especially once lipids get involved (almost all hydrophobic), especially in combination with other types of substances like oil soaked dirt or dead skin (like what you get on a doorknob at the micro level), it just doesn’t work the same way on the same timescales with colder temps - it fundamentally can’t, chemistry doesn’t work that way. [https://www.chemguide.co.uk/physical/basicrates/temperature....]
If you want the same speed of reaction - aka same amount of oil converted to a not oil - with lower temps (and hence lower molecular velocities and less Brownian motion) you need more reactive chemicals and more aggressive physical action to get compound A in contact with compound B enough to have the reaction you need. It’s as true for soap as it is for anything else.
And this all of course has a giant * on it, since above a certain point the energy in the system causes parts of it to disassociate or form unwanted side reactions, so there is a limit where it ‘blows apart’, ‘crashes’, or ‘can’t stick’ to extend the analogy. I can’t think of any soap that would have that problem at temps within human ‘not going to immediately get 3rd degree burns’ ranges.
I too am a curious dry-skin person. I thought i had read something to the affect of the interaction between soaps and bacteria worked better in warm water than cold.
I'll be really interested if i can avoid warm water.
It’s bit ridiculous to ask for a citation for something as simple as washing hands. You could try for yourself during a week and see if it change something.
I'm glad that I've been making our household sanitizer then. Everclear is 95% ethanol (food safe)
I take 3 parts everclear with 1 part water. Mix, and put in spray bottles.
That's an alcohol concentration of .95*.75 = 71.25%
That's within the WHO's recommendations for concentrations from 70%-80%
It can be sprayed on your hands, surfaces, food, etc. And since it's all food-grade products, is safe (well, as much Everclear is "safe"!).
(You can also modify the recipe by using 3 parts everclear with 1 part food-grade aloe vera, for a lasting hydrating effect especially on the hands. Make sure you're not allergic to aloe before doing this. Anaphylactic shock is no laughing matter.)
Vegetable glycerin also works well for hydration in place of aloe, and has the advantage of not leaving residue on your hands. A bit harder to get your hands on, though.
It’s actually pretty easy to get, every pharmacy has it (extremely expensive), almost every ecig store that caters to DIY (expensive), and many stores for horse supplies (cheap). The quality (at least here in Germany) is exactly the same for all of them.
This works, but depending on where you live you might be paying tons of unnecessary tax by doing it. Many states have "sin taxes" on alcohol- in WA, they amount to something like 60% of the sticker price! You're just burning that money if you're using it on hand sanitizer.
When the pandemic first really started, you couldn't find any isopropyl anywhere. However the liquor store had 1.75l everclear for $30. 1 bottle of that lasted me 4 months, including making face shields in bags with this. As time went by, iso was gradually back on the shelves.. however the food grade benefits of everclear made this choice better all around.
We're on our 3rd handle, at a total cost of $90. And considering my SO is in the health field working with potential covid-positive indivuals, we consider this to have been well worth whatever we've paid in taxes. I'm sure other states have higher taxes. Thankfully we're not in one of those.
I happen to have purchased a large 1 gallon jug of sanitizer produced by ArtNaturals, the brand with the highest concentration detected, from Costco in October.
I’ve been using it daily ever since, and have even used it to refill the bottle of sanitizer in my car.
Later today I am shipping it off to Valisure to be tested.
They noted high variability in concentrations from batch to batch that they tested, so I’m hoping I got “lucky”.
Edit: by "lucky", I mean I hope my sanitizer was not contaminated or the contamination was minimal, obviously! Odd I even need to state this.
Aside from the benzene and methanol [1] contamination, I've never heard anyone else comment on all the sketchy emergency-authorization sanitizers at restaurants and other places that cause your hands to smell like prohibition era whiskey mixed with Pine-Sol for an hour. It's funny but it's also not, given the tons of money made selling chemical waste for people to put on their skin.
My hope is in the wake of resistant bacteria and diseases caused by a tsunami of endocrine disrupting chemical products, maybe society will come to the conclusion we ought to pragmatically consider data and peer reviewed science when we weigh the pros and cons of public policy. Nobody seems to be asking whether unprecedented amounts of waste, the sky-rocketing rates of suicide and deaths from child abuse, or state sanctioned extermination of species were worth it. Nobody seems to be asking how effective any of these measures were, or whether the goal was ever realistic. Let alone whether all this was worth preventing the inevitable spread of a disease that when all is said and done will kill around a couple million people, average age older than the average lifespan. Begs the question when we live in a world where 8 million people die of diseases associated with fossil fuel pollution, average age around 5 years old. Not going to hold my breath. If growing up post 9-11 taught me anything it's that humans just want to live their lives in fear of the unlikely and use it to be a jerk those they view as outsiders to the tribe.
Fwiw the US really botched the lockdown strategy through lack of coordination. Lockdowns don’t appear to be feasible for longer than a month; people begin to break the rules and reduce its efficacy, plus the economic damage starts to overshadow the health effects. For shorter periods, however, they stop outbreaks. The best strategy is then to use masks, cancel large gatherings, and use lockdowns in short bursts to respond to outbreaks.
The US couldn’t form a cohesive strategy around this and fell into a partisan fight over whether to lockdown at all, leading to a perpetual half-implemented lockdown, the worst of all options. If we choose to do a retrospective on the value of lockdowns, we should bear in mind that “perpetually” is not the only way to use them.
Since the hand sanitizer that smells like whiskey (mine smells more like tequila) comes from beverage distillers, it seems that they'd already know how to make ethanol without benzene and other contaminants since they are distilling for human consumption.
As a distillery owner I was happy to see that this wasn't another takedown of craft distillers by the sanitizer industry. Very good to see zero US distilleries in their report.
I wasn't aware of any issues with distillery produced hand sanitizer, real or scare tactic. There was an earlier issue with methanol in hand sanitizer, but I would have figured distilleries wouldn't have trouble with that since they already have to deal heavily with preventing methanol getting in the final product and it's a well understood thing
There was a kerfuflle some months back when the FDA was going around slapping huge fines on craft distilleries who were making hand sanitizer. Don't recall the specifics, it was either something about exceeding allowed production quotas for ethanol, or taxes, maybe both. I believe that sanity prevailed and the fines were not imposed.
there are some flat licensing fees for each production facility the FDA oversees, and since you're producing hand sanitizer, well... no good deed left unpunished.
"""In June 2020, FDA updated their guidelines for the production of liquid hand sanitizer to temporarily allow for the presence of benzene of up to 2.0 ppm “to reflect data submitted by fuel ethanol manufacturers producing ethanol via fermentation and distillation, indicating that at least some of their fuel ethanol products have harmful chemicals, including gasoline and benzene, which are known human carcinogens (cancer-causing agents).”"""
WTF government, this is why many of us don't trust you.
i mean, what's the alternative here? This feels like just the complexity and tradeoffs of living in reality -- a bit of perpetual "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
Either they're "preventing life-improving sanitizer from reaching citizens in a time of need", or they're "poisoning citizens" by letting through just a tiny bit of byproduct that would be MUCH more common if they weren't taking a regulatory role.
This is an apparatus solving a complex, high-dimensional system of equations, not as academic test for which there's a real "right answer", no? * shrug *
> If this is what it takes to get people to wear a mask when sick (as habit) and wash their appendages
That’s the noble goal, but in reality it seems this strategy has led to enormous divisions, eroded the credibility of our institutions, and required the support of a censorship appendage clothed modestly by the fig leaf of private enterprise.
Telling the whole truth without trying to manipulate the behavior of adults feels like it would’ve been a wiser approach.
Entertain the notion that you may have it backwards: that accepting the institutions at face value _all the time_ is irrational given the past several decades of Kafkaesque proceedings. This can lead to a general hesitance which may seem ignorant but is actually versed in hard earned wisdom.
Our institutions are often inept, but only rarely are they malicious. The fact remains that they provide necessary benefits that the free market wont. Healthcare, welfare, infrastructure, law enforcement etc.
These systems were always mired in flawed bureaucracy. The thing that changed is talking heads spending 30 years convincing americans of all political spectrums that one or more of those dozens of institutions was the boogeyman. Sometimes it has gone as far as getting politicians elected who then intentionally break these systems simply to gain a propaganda victory (see intentionally inefficient unemployment systems).
As is often the case, when people need to actually interact with these parts of the system (those parts that aren't intentionally crippled by politics at least), they realize the benefit and change their view from skeptical to supportive.
I mean maybe in the broader sense, but bringing it back to something concrete: the CDC has a singular purpose, and plenty of money for planning so it can carry out that purpose. But having leaders who say things like (paraphrasing) “masks are better than vaccines” isn’t helpful, and I don’t see how that could be caused by the media.
It’s possible that trust in institutions has decreased due to media and our specific disease control institutions suffer from cultural rot and antipathy towards the little people.
The only thing that matters is: what is the risk of 2ppm of it in hand sanitizer? My guess is that it's very little
It is volatile. It won't spend much time in your hand. You won't breathe a significant amount of it. You aren't ingesting it.
"Oh but Benzene is carcinogenic" yes, it's also present in Whisky, in a bread slice that was left too long in the toaster, etc.
> The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set a permissible exposure limit of 1 part of benzene per million parts of air (1 ppm) in the workplace during an 8-hour workday
The reality is, no one drinking hand sanitizer out of dispensers at the hospital is going to live long enough to see any real change in cancer risk due to 2ppm benzene in the hand sanitizer though are they?
Pretty sure you’re gonna die of straight up ethanol poisoning or cirrhosis of the liver before even 100ppm of benzene contamination in said 70% pure ethanol is going to do it. Just a guess, not volunteering for that study.
2ppm isn't a lot, and it is a temporary measure. Benzene can be absorbed through the skin but most of it evaporates off (as hand sanitizer is intended to do) before it is absorbed.
So yeah. The FDA reasonably updating guidelines to make sure people can buy hand sanitizer during a global pandemic is probably better than the fraction of a percent increased risk of cancer.
Not everyone who disagrees with you is stupid. You are entitled to your take on my unpopular opinion but it's arguing in bad faith to label my concerns as "dramatic". I simply disagree about the tradeoffs and it doesn't come from an uninformed or non-quantitatively-thinking position, I just weigh health risk mitigation higher than you do (even for long tail risks).
In this case, my primary issue isn't with the 2ppm of benzene itself, it's with the race to quickly and quietly change it in the first place. The FDA (and the Feds in general) move glacially on important topics but when their buddies in the ethanol fuel business need something, they jump to loosen regulations to make production easier.
False dilemma. This doesn't require a long standing conspiracy (or one at all), just a willingness to benefit big business, which generally doesn't favor the citizenry.
Hand sanitizer is unnecessary for most people. Washing hands is better, and surface contact is no longer thought to be a significant vector for COVID transmission.
Considering that most hand sanitizer is simply alcohol + aloe gel - yes this makes sense, but aloe is in there for a reason (alcohol is incredibly harsh on your skin).
Soap is great but requires people to go through the much more rigorous and unavailable method of washing hands. Hand sanitizers are much faster and easier, which makes sanitization available in areas where it wasn't previously. For example in the office, school, stores, anywhere you're handling materials, etc.
You should absolutely wash hands too, but there are a lot of reasons for portable hand sanitizers.
but sanitizer is egregiously overused by the public, and most of it is doing nothing but pressing adaptation in microbes rather than reducing infections. it's useful in certain food-handling, waste-handling and healthcare settings, but not in most common situations like (semi-)public spaces and handling ordinary materials.
the amount of friction presented by washing likely produces a more ideal balance between considerations like infection reduction, evolutionary pressure, and hypochondria/mysophobia inducement. the simple rule of thumb is to wash around waste, food prep/consumption, and illness. more than that, especially most sanitizer use because it's mostly outside of these situations, is likely a net-negative.
It is pretty unlikely microbes are going to be building up resistance to the microbial equivalent of getting doused in gasoline and set on fire.
It dissolves the lipid shell and denatures key proteins in the shell. This is not subtle.
In the evolutionary influence perspective for a microbe, it also still isn’t particularly common. Triclosan and the other problematic chemicals are much more targeted and more problematic from a resistance perspective because of it.
I’d really hesitate before depending on that to any extent health wise. Water is an amazing solvent, and you get huge benefit from washing things away in it after oils and similar hydrophobic substances have been de-hydrophobic’d
Yep. Made a little portable sink for my trunk. After going anywhere, we dip our hands in the bucket, grab a bar and start scrubbing. Made a rinse hose out of some tygon tubing and a clamp. Oh sure, we get some stares, but it sure beats the cancer risk!
The best thing is that it evaporates very quickly and isn’t toxic like the Clorox cleaners. But it also dissolved some inks which sucks.
I have a 2 year supply of isopropyl alcohol now. I hoarded last year and have way more than I will need because I stopped cleaning groceries and washing down countertops because I stopped believing it did anything. But better save than sorry!
The other additives in hand sanitizer can be anything from methanol to discourage consumption (and avoid liquor taxes) and fragrances. I've bought some little bottles before that leave such a strong fragrance you have to go wash your hands before eating anything anyway.
Most are fuel/technical/food grade denatured ethyl alcohol (ethanol) with glycerin (glycerol) as a humectant/thickener. IPA is allowable but more expensive.
A number of them have been made from the heads and tails of normal spirit distillation process (which are waste products), or are distilled with other organic waste products (like dog food process waste), which often smell awful and are super sticky.
I bought a gallon of some stuff early into the pandemic from a online retailer that sells commercial fog machine supplies. It smells likes farts. I felt bad giving bottles of it to friends and family but it wasn't like there was much else available on the shelves and at the time touch contamination was still a big concern. I added some fragrances so it smells mostly like lemons now and only a hint of farts.
We bought another gallon from a cosmetics supply wholesaler and it was much less stinky.
This reminds me of when Perrier water was recalled in 1990 after it was found to be contaminated with benzene. The contamination was only discovered because a random environmental protection lab had been using Perrier instead of deionized water for convenience. They were puzzled when benzene spikes started showing up in their samples. Eventually they realized their samples were find and the bottled water was the source.
I'd be curious to see whether we actually see an uptick in cancers in the coming months/years. If so, I wonder whether it will turn out that using hand sanitizer resulted in a net increase or decrease in overall mortality.
While the IFR of COVID varies, it appears to be below 1% for most regions of the world, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v.... Could anyone who is more informed than me estimate what the increased mortality would be for those who religiously use hand sanitizer with this level of benzene? My guess is still lower than COVID but I have no reference point.
One of the hand sanitizers that was tested had as much as 16.1ppm benzene. That's not great, as it's believed that some small portion of benzene a person is exposed to can be absorbed through the skin, but... yeah. 16.1ppm.
Gasoline can contain on average 0.62% benzene, and it evaporates quite quickly. Gasoline vapor is genuinely dangerous to human health. (demonstrably less so now that we've stopped putting tetraethyl lead in it, but still)
I'm getting this strange vibe from your comment that somehow sanitizer-induced cancer might be a greater problem than COVID, which doesn't agree with common sense if you ask me. What am I missing here?
That's because it's not common sense to compare sanitizer-induced cancer rates to overall COVID rates. To determine whether the use of hand sanitizer is a net positive, you have to compare the deaths caused by hand sanitizer to the deaths prevented by hand sanitizer. Unfortunately, it would be pretty difficult to get accurate numbers for either of those figures, even if you just narrow it down to cancer and COVID.
But problem is that people getting sanitiser cancer are maybe not the ones who would be dying because corona. If old people are at great risk you can not tell whole population for to do something risking cancers to protecting them. I am young enough and at very very low risk of deaths from corona so am not desiring for to use sanitizer and for to maybe getting benzene cancers.
They didn't say it's a worse problem than covid. They said it might be a worse problem than getting covid from touching stuff, since that turned out to be way less common than airborne droplet transmission.
Comparing deaths caused by COVID to deaths caused by contaminated hand sanitizer isn't a fair comparison.
Comparing lives saved by hand sanitizer to lives lost to sanitizer contamination is what I'm reading here, though it seems pretty difficult to measure either.
I think the proposal is that sanitizer induces more risk than it mitigates, since it's now unlikely that hand sanitation is related to covid transmission.
Nonetheless, other things are transmitted by unclean hands, which is almost certainly a greater risk than the benzene.
Limiting action when things fly in the face of common sense is wise. Limiting the questions you ask to common sense is not always wise.
Some times the world is counterintuitive, and the only way to find something out is to test it. While it probably is not the case there may be poor outcomes from hand sanitizer. Would they be worse than CoVid, probably not. However given the scope of CoVid all we have to do to test this is wait. If hand sanitizer was to cause that much trouble it would become obvious at scale.
I agree with most of the other replies to your comment. The world is full of counter-intuitives and I'm genuinely curious about whether this is one.
As I said, my guess is that the risk of surface-transmission of COVID is probably still greater than the risk of increased exposure to benzene. But I think given the low risk of surface transmission, it might still be worth a comparison.
Although Valisure has made a good faith effort to obtain samples reasonably representative of the general supply, many brands and formulations are not included
I guess the sampling methodology is key if you’re trying to learn anything about overall risk to the public. 92% of the batches sampled had levels that were within FDA guidelines, but unless we know how representative those samples are in terms of market share, it really tells us very little. 16ppm seems crazy high though.
Always worth bearing in mind the general principle of taking only the minimum effective dose of anything; you’re trying to sanitise your hands, not strip your epidermis away through carpet bombing.
In the beginning of the pandemic, I bought 5 + 2 gallons of food-grade ethanol. I also bought Everclear at 60% knowing others could be cocktails of chemicals made somewhere abroad. Unfortunately, recently I lowered my guard and started to use more convenient stuff bought at Amazon, and I started to get some irritation with it.
Not too long ago organic chemistry students (in the 70s) were washing their glass using benzene instead of just using acetone, without great protection. Of course we now know Benzene is bad for health, but certainly not at the trace level we are talking about here...
Honestly, I'm less concerned about the benzene and more concerned by the implication that hand sanitizer makers are trying to make their hand sanitizers taste good.
1. I didn't know that eyeballs have taste buds. This gives me some new restaurant ideas.
2. Usually the idea is that you make it taste bad so that people ain't tempted to ingest it (or quickly learn not to). Same reason why compressed air cans have bittering agents: so that people don't huff 'em.
I'm not sure how having great tasting hand sanitizer would make it any less shocking when someone squirts it in their eyes? Since you're not supposed to be drinking it at all, I don't see the benefit in flavoring it.
I know stories back when anti-lice medicine was expensive and rare (1960s-1970s), guys would shave off their head but girls couldn't, so they would pour benzine on their hair instead to get of the lice, and take several days off the school for the smell to go away.
I got a couple 8oz bottles of Purell near the beginning of the pandemic, then it completely disappeared from shelves and it's only been recently that I've seen it stocked again
It was rare only for the first couple months, since then you can find it everywhere. Even grocery stores now have thermometers and other corona gear that weren't even carrying before.
If you’re doing this, make sure you are not using technical grade isopropyl, as that can have a bunch of nasty side products in it. Getting the correct isopropyl online is problematic as people have been watering down technical grade and selling it as 70% medical (USP) grade.
Don't you need the glycerine to prevent your skin from getting dry? dry skin is more prone to micro wounds and cracks that allow the bacteria and virus to get in.
Also keep in mind that along with the other volatiles, much of the benzene will evaporate into the air after application and you will likely breathe some of that vapor.
Total layman here. Question: if 5ppm in drinking water is safe, which would imply we deem it safe to drink unlimited amount of water with 5ppm benzene in it for our entire lives; would it really be problematic to use hand sanitizers with 15ppm (3x) for a few months? (Also considering, as other commenters in this thread say, ingesting benzene through skin is less efficient compared to drinking, according to some claims).
I've no idea how they determine safe ranges for these chemicals, but as an engineer, I'm thinking if I were to do something like this, I'd leave some wiggle room. Like if I say 5ppm is safe, but if noticeable amount of people get leukemia with 10ppm, I would consider my job failed. Because 5ppm, although is safe, is too close to the danger zone therefore is not practical. So I'd guess small perturbations around 5ppm would not have noticeable affects (again, I'm a total layman, this is a question, not a claim).
Nit: it's parts per billion, million - only OSHA benzene exposure limits are measured in the millions and that's for industries working with benzene (and only for a short exposures).
The kinetics of benzene in drinking water are very different than in hand sanitizer. Carcinogens in general have different risk profiles than other toxins like heavy metals or poisons because localized concentrations can be just as dangerous since a tumor can form and metastasize pretty much anywhere. Asbestos, for example, is much less dangerous in drinking water than in the air because the lubrication provided by water significantly reduces the physical damage caused by the fibers.
Benzene (probably [1]) bioaccumulates in skin far more readily than in the digestive tract where the water is a diluting agent that reduces the probability of the benzene sticking around in the body. Since there is a lot less volume of blood flow in the tiny capillaries near the skin and hand sanitizer is designed to evaporate, there's a far higher risk of carcinogenic concentrations of benzene building up, especially around cuts or lesions.
It's very plausible that a few mL of sanitizer with ppb concentrations of benzene can accumulate in small microliter pockets of tissue with concentrations in the 10s or 100s of ppm if continually applied throughout the day for months on end. Throw in the rapid pace of reproduction of skin cells and that's a legitimate cause for concern.
[1] last I looked, it wasn't well studied in humans, but since benzene is a solvent and known to accumulate in leaves and bark, it strongly implies it has the same effect up and down the food chain.
Another good reason not to drink hand sanitizer, but this is a corporate press release in search of a problem. The first thing any minute traces of benzene will do is evaporate harmlessly off your hands, likely giving you orders of magnitude less benzene exposure than you get filling your gas tank.
I just threw out some Born Basic (~3.5 ppm C₆H₆) that was purchased on-sale but I didn't have the receipt.
This is some BS. The US needs to get its chemicals oversight, regulations, and enforcement up to European standards. TSCA is just one example of horrible laws that permit poisons.
I've found that hand sanitizer triggers it. Sounds weird, but I'm pretty sure, as I went on and off sanitizer about 4 times during this pandemic and I noticed the symptom come and go every time.
That reminds me of my first N26 bank card in Germany. I got one in the mail and immediately called them: "Wtf? Why is the card transparent?". 5 seconds later: "That shows our commitment to transparency..."
