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The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom
- Mattasher 3y agoThis hand sanitizer everywhere thing was just one of the many unproductive insanities of the Covid era. Quick story: In 2021 I was shopping at an Office Max in Florida. At the counter, the checkout guy snuck two small bottles into my bag. Me: Wait! I didn't buy that! Him: Don't worry, it's free. Me: Ok, but what is it? Him: Hand sanitizer, we're giving them away. Me: (Takes bottles out of bag, hands back to him)
- wewtyflakes 3y agoCan you elaborate on why you believe it was unproductive insanity?
- purpleflame1257 3y agoBecause it was clear early on that covid was not droplet transmission and that hand santizer did jack shit. But nobody would acknowledge this for ages, leading to other crazy shit like shutdown playgrounds.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoIt wasn't clear for months, but yes it did carry on too long.
- danmaz74 3y agoIt was very clear from where? https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/sars-cov-2-transmission.html#:~:text=Exposure%20occurs%20in%20three%20principal,hands%20that%20have%20been%20soiled https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
- revelio 3y agoIt was clear by March 2020 when the passengers on the Diamond Princess were all locked down in their cabins and COVID didn't care at all, managing to infect people all over the ship essentially at random. This is only possible if it is able to spread long distances via the air; if transmission were droplet or surface based that would have ended the outbreak immediately. Please don't cite the CDC for anything, they're utterly discredited.
- JohnFen 3y ago> they're utterly discredited. I see no reason to think that. Sure, mistakes were made (as is expected), but utterly discredited? That's a bit over the top.
- lesuorac 3y agoNot utterly discredited but definitely consider their press releases with the same amount of skepticism as a corporate press release. Like from now on, if they say "its not airborne" assume "it can transmit in the air" (i.e. droplets or by insects). If they say "there's no evidence of X" assume "We don't think X is false".
- Scoundreller 3y ago> were all locked down in their cabins and COVID didn't care at all, managing to infect people all over the ship essentially at random. I wonder how much of this could be explained by multiple day incubation times and an asymptomatic infection being spread to cabin-mates. > This is only possible if it is able to spread long distances via the air Or people infected others filtering in and out of the same close quarters that are poorly ventilated (e.g. elevators and public bathrooms). Doesn’t even require you to be in there at the same time if it can float around for a few hours. My (still valid) joke about the pandemic is to always be upwind of whomever you’re in contact with. 6’/2M apart didn’t matter.
- revelio 3y ago
- pixl97 3y ago> that hand santizer did jack shit. Does hand sanitizer stop other illness? If yes, then it is still very useful in a pandemic. If you have to go to the hospital because you're shitting your brains out from something else, then you are at insanely high right from catching covid.
- pessimizer 3y ago> Does hand sanitizer stop other illness? Do you have any information supporting this possibility? Because hand sanitizer also might have made children stronger and taller, but I don't think it did.
- pixl97 3y agohttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5091001/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5091001/ >Hand sanitizers are more effective than plain soap and water alone in preventing transmission of bacteria from the hands of individuals. They play a significant role and could be an effective alternative to hand washing to achieve asepsis for all the health-care professionals in outreach program, water scarcity areas, and in routine clinical practice. Hence, stressing proper hand hygiene is an important first-line defense against the spread of multiple infectious diseases. Maybe looking up studies on this would be a good place to start... Of course I'm sure that there is a wide range of different answers on this that vary over a huge number of factors and illnesses in question.
- Scoundreller 3y agoA lot of gastrointestinal viruses (hello norovirus) are non-enveloped viruses and survive alcohol sanitizers. And non-enveloped viruses (like Noro) aren’t easily inactivated by time and sunlight like other viruses (flu, corona). Makes me really worry about dependence on alcohol sanitizers when it’s the difficult to deactivate viruses that easily pass the stomach and cause you bigger issues.
- Scoundreller 3y agoI wonder if it’s any clearer now that hand sanitizer does jack shit for every other respiratory virus too, like influenza. The “wash your hands” was a great way to blame victims for catching these diseases and push the liability to them. Easy to say to an employee “you got the flu because you didn’t wash your hands for 5 minutes” and disqualify their paid sick day. Much harder to blame them for… breathing at work. If we admit its airborne, then employees (and customers) have claims against the the business for work-acquired injuries.
- chaoticmass 3y agoWith respect to covid, I remember it being said that washing your hands with soap was the most effective way to stop the virus spreading from physical contact. Yet the assumption that many people had was that alcohol based hand sanitizer was more effective. Sure, hand sanitizer is better than nothing, but old fashion soap and water was what the doctors recommended. Thats my guess anyway.
- pers0n 3y agoYou didn’t always have access to a place to wash your hands or soap. Many Native Americans don’t have running water and sanitizer was needed badly, when they asked the government to help they got sent body bags instead
- f33d5173 3y agoMany people did have access to running water, and were buying up supply that plausibly could have been used by people who didn't.
- ackfoobar 3y agoThe heuristics that many people employ can be rather annoying. Another example regarding hand sanitizer: They used hand sanitizer after picking up and eating a cookie. And I was probably a weirdo for not doing so. Greasy fingers are a problem, and I guess they see hand sanitizer as a substitue for hand-washing. But hand sanitizer doesn't wash anything away.
- samstave 3y agoI=Funny I literally just wrote about this problem https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=samstave&next=36152239 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=samstave&next=361522... Basically - hand sanitzer fucks up your gut-biome and kills bacteria that is important for your immune system. STOP USING THEM. EAT DIRT - or you will be under dirt a lot faster.
- jxramos 3y agowhat did he say / how did he react when you handed it back?
- bipop5000 3y agoI was thinking about all of the masks that were created super quickly and also dumped. Those masks do not look like they would recycle quickly.
- loeg 3y agoThe cloth ones? They'll break down relatively quickly in landfills.
- nerdponx 3y agoAre they actually natural fiber? The surgical masks mostly seem like plastic, and the softer cloth masks might be synthetic-cotton blends.
- giantg2 3y agoThe medical ones are not really cloth and contain synthetic materials.
- loeg 3y agoSure, but the context is industries and products quickly spun up in 2020. Those masks were basic cloth ones, not the surgical masks more common now.
- giantg2 3y agoThere was a huge production jump for N95s and surgical masks in 2020, included companies that spun up and shipped potentially dangerous products (N95s by unheard of companies not actually being N95 compliant). Their usage is still up compared to pre-pandemic levels.
- loeg 3y agoOk? You can look at my original comment -- I'm talking about cloth ones. I'm not interested in arguing with you about the relative proportion of cloth masks and synthetic masks.
- commandlinefan 3y agoI worry about overuse of hand sanitizer creating antibiotic resistant "superbugs" as we've been told for decades... but I sure as hell can't go to a gas station or a grocery store without washing my hands with hand sanitizer any more. I feel like I can see the germs now.
- sithadmin 3y agoI've never encountered a hand sanitizer with antibiotics in it. They're alcohol-based, and kill bacteria by destroying their cellular membrane and screwing up proteins inside organisms that absorb it. They're not going to cause antibiotic resistance.
- bourgoin 3y agoThere have existed hand sanitizer formulations containing Triclosan or BZK instead of alcohol, although those compounds are more commonly used in anti-bacterial soaps. Triclosan was particularly controversial because of its potential to cause antibiotic resistance and also for being an endocrine disruptor. During the second half of the last decade, its usage was widely restricted by regulatory agencies and it was phased out of a ton of consumer products.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoWashing your hands after being in a public place is fine, you're not going to create antibiotic resistance with simple hygiene. If you're using hand sanitizer dozens of times a day that's a different story (mostly because it's going to do a number on your skin).
- mikeyouse 3y agoProper sanitizer - e.g. alcohol with ~70% concentration - is as close to "resistance-proof" as is possible. There's never been any indication of adaptations at that level, it's just too destructive to bacterial cells. Avoid the "alcohol-free" sanitizers since they rely on other chemicals to achieve the same effect but go crazy with the alcohol-based ones.
- dabluecaboose 3y ago
- moffkalast 3y agoThe unsterilized masses, they cannot make the judgement call.
- loeg 3y agoTl;dr: ArtNaturals made hand sanitizer with very high levels of benzene (a carcinogen) and after a fire and runoff into the Dominguez Channel, produced a bunch of hydrogen sulfide (the "rotten eggs" smelling gas). When the FDA reimposed pre-pandemic sanitizer rules, companies were forced to dispose of the crap they produced under the lax rules. Some tried to do so by giving it away to schools or illegally dumping it underground. Other sanitizer has sat around abandoned until it caught fire.
- 14 3y agoNow I am a little uneasy about the sanitizer I bought. I walked into Walmart one day and they had these giant bottles of liquid hand sanitizer with a 80% alcohol content and it works great and doesn’t leave a residue. It was on for 25cents a bottle when normally something that size would sell for about $8. I couldn’t believe they were getting rid of it for so cheap so bout about 100 bottles and have been using it for months. Wish there was a way I could test for benzene and I wonder if Walmart knew it was bad and decided to dump it on customers so they wouldn’t be sitting with thousands of bottles needing disposal.
- burnished 3y agoLooks like there are kits in the 60-100$ range, a local college chemistry lab might also be able to do it, there may also be a simple test you can apply - sounds like much more effort than what you put in acquiring, might be worthwhile to just cut it at a loss if you think it is a risk at all
- neilv 3y ago> an independent lab in Connecticut called Valisure announced that it had found benzene in the company’s sanitizer. [...] Not long after, a horrified nurse in Arizona captured a photograph of ArtNaturals bottles on sale at her local Walmart for 50 cents, with a sign nearby saying that they used to be $2.97. Your heirs might have a viable lawsuit.
- loeg 3y agoMight as well just toss it unless you regularly need to kill bacteria on your hands away from running water.
- Footkerchief 3y agoJust one aspect of the huge, tragicomic waste that resulted from the medical establishment's position that airborne transmission couldn't be real because it reminded everyone too much of miasma theory. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ina.13070 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ina.13070
- mikeyouse 3y agoSeems like an excessively speculative theory when the alternative, "SARS1 infections were overwhelmingly driven by droplet spread and SARS-COV 2 is a close relative so we expect it to behave similarly" is right there..
- Vecr 3y agoThat's not correct, at least in hospitals and apartment buildings there was pretty good evidence that SARS was airborne, at least over short distances. Yes, I mean actually airborne, not ballistic droplets. I'm not thinking "yeah sure I knew that" in hindsight like people quite often do, this is from research I did in 2018. I wore P100 elastomeric respirators from the start of the pandemic, I didn't question for a second that it was airborne.
- dabluecaboose 3y agoLooking back, it was crazy how much emphasis was placed on surface transmission. I remember people talking about wiping down grocery boxes left in front of their door with hand sanitizer and leaving it to sit for 72 hours before bringing it inside.
- rlpb 3y agoI was very picky about the brands of hand santizer we used during the pandemic and I'm glad I did. I guess I can't know if my caution was sufficient or not.
- globular-toast 3y agoInteresting that everyone is talking in past tense in this thread. Where I live hand sanitiser is still everywhere and people still use it all the time. I don't recall ever seeing it outside of hospitals prior to the pandemic.
- kgwgk 3y agoI miss it now. Cleaning your hands before eating is not a bad habit to have.
- globular-toast 3y agoI always did and still do clean my hands before eating. I don't see how it's related to hand sanitiser or COVID.
- kgwgk 3y agoHaving the sanitizer waiting for you as soon as you approach an eating place - without having to find a restroom with running water and soap - is convenient. Even if it doesn’t change anything for you, you can surely see how it can make a difference for others.
- globular-toast 3y agoCarry hand sanitiser with you. Using hand sanitiser isn't cleaning your hands, though.
- rtsil 3y agoI still use them (and masks). I haven't had a cold, the flu or any of the usual seasonal sicknesses in 3 years, and this spring my pollen allergy was nowhere to be seen. My quality of life is significantly better ever since I started using them. Washing my hands for 30 seconds at least also helps.
- slily 3y ago
- thenipper 3y agoI had this problem with a ton of leftover sanitizer that my parents got me. I eventually let it 'cook off' in the sun. But i did get to show my kids how ethanol produces an 'invisible' flame.
- lynx23 3y agoTL;DR: If all media tell you the same thing over and over again, just don't do it and you should be safe. Propaganda is propaganda, don't get confused if many people around you fall for it, just stay on your path and trust your intuition and supress the urge to follow the herd.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoThe average consumer was fine, just don't start a business based on what's very likely temporary policy. Though, I suppose one could argue that business is always a gamble and some people made a lot of money off of the pandemic.
- emodendroket 3y agoYeah, that's why I use a charcoal grill inside. The media keeps saying to use it outside but I can't trust them.
- lesuorac 3y agoAnd charcoal always goes on sale going into the winter so its just so economical to heat the whole house.
- dennis_jeeves1 3y agoSarcasm, I know, but sir you do make a royal fool of yourself by not noticing the distinction.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoIn all of these posts there is a strong 'what were they thinking' reaction. - remember hindsight. At the time, how were they supposed to know, by looking into their crystal ball? It was a fast, dynamically changing situation, everyone was getting sick, who a the time could say 'yeah, people are dying, but YOLO, no need to sanitize your hands.' Lot of freaking armchair quarterbacks in the 'lets criticize the medical community' co-hort.
- jquery 3y agoIt's akin to a master caution alarm on a plane and the engines just cut out. Until there's more data on exactly what the issue is, pilots should generally follow the checklists. Avoidable accidents happen when pilots make assumptions about what is wrong (e.g., "oh my instruments must be incorrect") instead of following their checklists/training. Until we knew that surface transmission wasn't a serious vector, it made total sense to guard against it.
- jethro_tell 3y agoBut, also, until we knew that it wasn't transmitted through the air, we should have been recommending masking with high quality masks. That right there could have changed the vector of this whole thing. Instead, 6 months in when we knew it was transmitted through air, we continued to make businesses sanitize their checkouts while people walked around in ineffective cloth masks. Really fucked the dog there.
- whitemary 3y agoQuality masks require actual capital investments, so longer term commitments. Toxic hand sanitizer can turn a profit with practically zero capital investment. This is precisely how capitalism works. Socialism or barbarism.
- Scoundreller 3y agoAnd proper planning and motivation. My jurisdiction (Ontario and Canada) stockpiled 10s of millions of N95 masks after SARS1. Instead of cycling inventory, they let them expire, disposed them and never replaced them. https://globalnews.ca/news/6715814/coronavirus-n95-masks-ontario/amp/ https://globalnews.ca/news/6715814/coronavirus-n95-masks-ont... https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5530081 https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5530081 Then, get this, a few years later, they needed them! Best part was I already worked at an organization that required mask fitting for all employees, but when the pandemic hit that this was in preparation for, everybody wanted them and there weren’t any available.
- revelio 3y ago> What happened next is a lesson about leaving disaster response to the whims of capitalism. Companies did exactly what the government wanted them to do: make hand sanitizer as fast as possible and at massive scale. The lesson here is about leaving disaster response to governments. The FDA had a bunch of tactics it could have used. It could have continued to do inspections and changed the rules to say if you don't pass you have to display a notice of that prominently on the bottle. It could have kept the rules and just let companies scale up within the limits. Or most obviously, it could have bothered double-checking and realized that hand sanitizer wasn't going to do anything about a virus that spreads via cloud-like aerosols. The fact that SARS-CoV-2 spread this way was widely known to independent skeptics by the time the company in the article was applying for permission to make sanitizer. What happened on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship demonstrated that the virus must be spreading through air ducts, rendering lockdowns, hand sanitizers and masks all useless. It was also expected because SARS-1 spread this way too, and because masks had never had an impact on respiratory illness before either. All this was ignored because the medical establishment didn't know what to do if this fact was recognized. They preferred to tell people to engage in pointless and self-destructive behavior rather than say, ok, maybe there's nothing we can do except let doctors get on with it. This aerosol denial was never formally ended and so large parts of the population is still unable to process reality even today, especially in academia and healthcare. Instead they invent ever more bizarre and desperate attempts to try and explain the abject failures of all these mitigations.
- emodendroket 3y agoHow is it "leaving the response to governments" if they say "OK, guys, produce as much crap as you want to whatever standard you want, but don't put benzene in it, although we won't penalize you if you do"?
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- pierat 3y agoWow, this article really makes me feel like I dodged the bullet for our household when I realized that 95% (190 proof) Everclear was available for $35/1.75l I did the chemistry math and figured 3 parts Everclear:1 part water equalled 71.25% ethyl alcohol, within the recommended of the WHO. I even tried adding in food grade aloe to help not be as damaging on the skin (instead of water). Worked really well too. We didn't spray down every surface, but we did grocery cart handles. Even outside of a pandemic, those are NASTY. But yeah, we had NO issue in sanitizer. And ours you could drink too! Hahahha
- perardi 3y agoYeah, repurposing Everclear got me through the pandemic. I cut it with Diet Coke, and a splash of lime, and drank it to help sanitize my system of coronavirus particles. Kept me COVID-free. I think. I don’t really remember much of the past 3 years for some reason, drinking that every day…but no nagging cough!
- burnished 3y agoYes, for me it turned out that I had already been practicing social distancing for some time and had gotten quite good at it. Cheap beer and video games helped me be a model citizen
- hackernewds 3y agoA period of time where everyone was required to isolate indoors, and cover half their face outdoors really gave me an edge against my tall, fit and extroverted peers, and got me 3 accelerated promotions. Really cut their advantages down.
- dylan604 3y agoHow's your eyesight?
- Scoundreller 3y agoReally good. Came in handy for reading my liver biopsy novella!
- acyou 3y agoThis issue is a wrecking ball being swung first this way, then the other way, to create division, hatred, polarization, radicalization and the feeling of being marginalized on all sides. Who benefits from consuming this article? Was it not mass media used as a primary vector to create the hysteria in the first place? And will the wheel not again soon turn, so that the criticized can criticize the criticizers from their moral high ground created by manufactured narrative and invective? The lesson here is: We should not read or promote these divisive articles. Three years ago, Wired were contributing to this problem: Yes, great idea, we should just buy the methanol and benzene containing products online and make hand sanitizer ourselves. https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-make-hand-sanitizer/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-make-hand-sanitizer/ Probably, the same lesson extends to most mass media. Consumption of mass media like this seems to tend to create knock-on effects that don't necessarily align with our best interests. We should find something better to do with our limited time.
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoThis is one peculiarly shrill post. Can you explain your mention of "division, hatred, polarization, radicalization" related to this article? I'm not saying you're wrong but it's a very strange opinion and seemingly entirely disproportionate.
- acyou 3y agoIt's tough to explain. It's something to do with not standing on any particular side, but attempting to cast blame and start arguments. If you read through the HN comments, and think about the bigger picture and what will result from the publishing of the article, isn't the most lasting effect pitting one group against another? Hasn't the article done a great job of doing that, and is that not the primary effect of this article being published? It seems clear enough to me. People who believe one thing are also reading this article in resentment and despair. You don't think about them, but they are out there. When the next crisis comes, they will remember how their world view was publicly shamed, and more loudly and actively assert their views. And the people who are on top now, or think they are due to the current media cycle, will build resentment in turn. And the cycle will continue. I'm not saying they shouldn't be allowed to publish it and sow discord. They should. I'm saying that we shouldn't elevate it. Unfortunately, even me commenting on this probably goes against that idea.
- simonbutt 3y agoThat first photo has to be Midjourney. Have we hit the turning point where AI art is suddenly embedded in everything?
- pcurve 3y agoDoesn't look like she's using MJ yet? https://www.instagram.com/saharrrana/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/saharrrana/?hl=en
- DerekBickerton 3y agoAnecdotal: I wash my hands more now after the Pandemic. Not that I have OCD, but it's been documented that many OCD sufferers had very strict parents who demanded their children washed their hands at every instance, and that passed into adulthood. Maybe I'm a victim of the Pandemic era and continue to wash my hands religiously, often to the extreme?
- WeylandYutani 3y agoCOVID got me to wash my hands more often so I'm not angry.
- jcadam 3y agoWatching everyone around me go insane actually made me less of a hypochondriac.
- crazygringo 3y ago> Several fires involving large amounts of unsellable hand sanitizer have broken out across the country in the past year, from Dallas to downtown Los Angeles. It's not quite clear why there have been so many fires, especially when we've been making and storing and shipping hand sanitizer in warehouses for a long time. Is it: 1) Something about these new companies wasn't following safety protocols, because they were new and/or rushing to market? 2) Existing safety protocols were being followed at the same rate, but the manufacturing and distribution network of hand sanitizers grew exponentially, and so fires grew along with it and this is a non-story? 3) The fires were a result of storing hand santizier intended for disposal rather than sale, so in different warehouses/locations that had different/less safety regulations or compliance? 4) The fires were set intentionally before the products were officially classified for disposal, so costs could be recouped through insurance fraud?
- emodendroket 3y agoThis seems suggestive... isn't it likely that some of the contaminants they let slide were more combustible? > On March 20, the US Food and Drug Administration announced that it was relaxing its regulations on hand sanitizer to “provide flexibility to help meet demand during this outbreak.” Those regulations, known as the Current Good Manufacturing Practices, had been in place since 1994 and included regularly updated rules on everything from record-keeping to product testing to packaging. The agency also paused the requirement under the Federal Food Drug & Cosmetics Act that sanitizer be sourced from pharmaceutical-grade ethanol, which is free of industrial toxins that are commonly found in fuel-grade ethanol. Businesses were still expected to test their sanitizers for benzene and other toxic compounds, but essentially on an honor system. The FDA noted that it did “not intend to take action against firms” for violations during the public health emergency. > [...] > By mid-June the FDA had received so many complaints that it started compiling an online list of “hand sanitizers consumers should not use.” Because the agency does not have recall authority for over-the-counter drugs, the offending companies themselves were expected to pull products marked as unsafe. Consumers had to go out of their way to find the list and stay up to date as it got longer and longer. By the end of that first pandemic summer, nearly 200 types of sanitizer appeared on the list. > ArtNaturals was, at that point, not on the list. Its sanitizer, labeled with a tasteful, millennial-friendly design that said it was vegan and infused with jojoba oil, was marketed as “safe for kids” and “a great bulk hand sanitizer pack for parents and teachers.” At least two school districts on the West Coast had purchased the sanitizer to distribute to students, in addition to two Ivy League universities. Then, in March 2021, a year into sales, an independent lab in Connecticut called Valisure announced that it had found benzene in the company’s sanitizer. Benzene, a widely used industrial chemical derived from petroleum, can be absorbed through the skin and is known to be a risk factor for leukemia. Then again, intentional destruction is certainly a possibility too.
- johncessna 3y agohttps://archive.is/AjH36 https://archive.is/AjH36
- metadat 3y agoWill the $12 million dollar fine even cover what it cost the city to house thousands in motels for 3 months? $200/night * 1000 = $200,000/day, 1.4 million bucks a week per thousand people. Times 9 weeks... That's around $40 million minimum for 3k people. Externalities are nasty.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoDuring the initial lockdowns, I strolled into a Beauty Supply storefront at the mall, and innocently asked for some Barbicide. That's the commercial-grade sanitizer that's blue; barbers drop combs into a branded glass bottle. The first one or two times they said "gee, sorry, no" and explained the supply chain problems and they haven't seen a shipment in a long time. After that it became sort of a comedy where I would hardly expect them to stock it anymore for ordinary mortals. I meticulously priced out beard trimmers and hair clippers for personal use. However, the barbers still seemed to sanitize OK. (I did have to switch to one that would trim my beard and not force me to keep a mask on during the service.) On a related note, even during the egg crisis, I've inadvertently ordered food featuring eggs at restaurants and I was not noticeably overcharged. It all just goes to show you the disparity in the commercial vs. personal supply chains. It was explained to me that commercial food service has extremely different requirements in terms of packaging, volume, pre-preparations, shipping, processing and ingredients, and during the lockdowns, the world feebly attempted a massive shift in those supply chains, and that's partly why they had problems, because they are not interchangeable.