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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
by VLM 6y ago
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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- asveikau 6y agoAnecdotally, hand sanitizer is quite popular in places I come across in San Francisco. Some businesses require a squirt of it at entry.
- fho 6y agoIt's basically mandatory in every grocery store in Germany ... and every other store follows suit.
- asveikau 6y agoEven 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.)
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoWhere I live in the US, I've never seen any business require hand sanitizer use.
- wkearney99 6y agoIn 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.
- aarongolliver 6y ago(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.
- dividedbyzero 6y agoIn 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)
- hedora 6y agoHand 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.
- SilverRed 6y agoYou could bring your own known safe bottle. I really doubt they would mind as long as they see you use something.
- tzs 6y ago> 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. There are people who have occasion to use hand sanitizer for reasons unrelated to COVID.
- oasisbob 6y agoNature 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: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4 Seems like an easy case where hindsight is 20/20.
- darkwater 6y agoThere is this nugget of wisdom in that article > 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.
- dimal 6y agoExcept 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?
- vkou 6y ago> Yet experts were telling people to wash their hands and NOT wear masks. Experts were telling people that wearing non-n95 masks is unlikely to protect you from other sick people. They are still correct on that point. You primarily wear cloth masks to protect other people, not to protect yourself.
- mannerheim 6y ago
- rarefied_tomato 6y agoThe 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.
- pushrax 6y agoThough 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.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoIf you wait for someone else to protect you from life's dangers, you'll be waiting a long time. Personally, I've decided to remove most "products" from my life, as much as possible, and I feel much better for it.