The Truth About Hand Sanitizer

I know I'm not the only person who carries around a bottle of hand sanitizer. And since the H1N1 scare, there are hand sanitizers dispensers all over the school. But does it really make a difference?

Hand Sanitizer vs. Soap and Water
We are sold this product (hand sanitizer) with the claim that it can replace hand washing. But what we ignore is that this should only be so in situations when there is no water and soap available. The Food and Drug Administration, in regards to regulations concerning proper procedures for food services, recommends that hand sanitizers not be used in place of soap and water but only as an adjunct.

This basically says that even though it may somehow help (and it is better than not washign hands at all), hand sanitizer is not fully effective when it is used on it own.

Kills 99.9% of Bacteria
This statement is mostly untrue. Manufacturers of these products can continue to claim that the sanitizers are up to 99.9 percent effective in killing germs because they were tested on inanimate surfaces rather than human hands.

Manufacturers perform the germ killing test on a inanimate objects, such as tables, and chairs. The human hand though is complex, a warm, living surface that is much more vulnerable to germ growth and attack. These manufacturers also perform these experiments in controlled situations with constant variables. Daily life is not controlled, and so is susceptibility to germs. If these tests were to have been conducted using live humans, the %99.9 claim would have to be removed.

"The physiological complexity of human skin makes
it very difficult to use for testing of this nature,"
Almanza (Barbara Almanza, associate professor of
restaurant, hotel, institutional and tourism manage-
ment) says. "The most clear and consistent results
were going tocome from using surfacesfor which the
variables can be controlled, and that's just not real life.
Real life is not neat and tidy."

Is it really necessary to strip bacteria from skin?
Actually, you can't fully kill all bacteria from the skin. Researchers have discovered that there are at least 250 kinds of bacteria that live on our skin. Some of the kinds they found were completely unknown.

Bacteria are natural, even necessary in human bodies. There are more bacterial cells in the human body than human cells. Not all bacteria are bad for you. The bacteria in our bodies are there for a reason. For example, bacteria in our intestines are important for digestion. It’s likely that the bacteria on our skin play important roles in keeping skin soft and enabling it to do what skin is supposed to do.

Conclusion
So why is hand sanitizer popular? Maybe because we’re obsessed with cleanliness, though it’s impossible to completely rid the skin of bacteria, and in any case it wouldn’t be a good idea to try.

There’s evidence that the bacteria that live in, and on us. They help protect us from microbes that do cause infections. Getting rid of our natural bacteria could pave the way for harmful bacteria to move in.


http://biology.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=biology&cdn=education&tm=46&f=10&su=p897.8.336.ip_&tt=2&bt=0&bts=1&zu=http%3A//news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/000211.Almanza.sanitizers.html
http://hubpages.com/hub/Hand-Sanitizers-The-Real-Truth