The theories of "destroying good bacteria as well as bad" and "we need germs to build our immune system" both make sense to me, but are of limited value without empirical evidence demonstrating a measurable impact on long-term health that can illustrate the connection between these concepts and the use of hand-sanitizer.
I would think hand-sanitizer has been around long enough that there should be some studies on its long-term effects. Like, do secondary schools in school districts where sanitizer is pushed at the primary level have a higher rate of medical-related absenteeism than non-sanitizer districts?
My son screamed whenever somebody tried to put that stuff on his hands, so we never had the issue.
I would think hand-sanitizer has been around long enough that there should be some studies on its long-term effects. Like, do secondary schools in school districts where sanitizer is pushed at the primary level have a higher rate of medical-related absenteeism than non-sanitizer districts?
Most of the (serious) theories I've seen around this sort of thing have related to allergies/sensitivities, rather than compromised immune systems. And I think you're overly sanguine on the readiness to fund long term studies on this sort of thing (or any sort of thing). But I don't recall hearing of any concrete evidence either way.
Hand sanitizer might be school supplies if your school has an elective on how to make sure the insurance company pays off the fire damage.
It's pronounced handitizer, heebie. Or so I'm corrected all the dang time.
This seems to be a reasonable summary (that is: not a copy-paste of a corporate "news" release) of the hand-sanitizer state of play. The bottom line: you want an alcohol-based (60%-95%) sanitizer, you want to use a decent dollop of it, they won't evolve superbugs, they won't work unless your hands aren't dirty, and there have actually been studies that show it works.
I for one am disappointed, as I mostly think "another attempt to get us to buy medical-related products that don't really do anything."
Presumably there is a cost though to constantly sloughing off the natural oils on your skin and leaving it dry.
Presumably there is a cost though to constantly sloughing off the natural oils on your skin and leaving it dry.
Is there any evidence that using hand sanitizer in the manner that most users do materialy diminishes the amount of pathogens one is exposed to?
Per 7, yes.
Just swashed a dollop. Been using alcohol constantly for years and still alive and infection free. Also use soap and water many times a day and those moist towelettes, Wet Ones.
1) Got used to it when I was a primary carer with the low immune system patient
2) A phobia about sticky fingers; another phobia about infecting my eyes. I eat burgers and pizza with a fork.
3) I like the way Purell feels and smells. The generic doesn't seem to work as well.
4) I trust the medical establishment and spent a lot of time in clinics and hospitals with alcohol at every doorway and most bedsides.
10 above: better than nothing
Is there a sound scientific justification for me to be annoyed?
I peed in it.
Heebie, your best bet might be to question what the sanitizer has in it, which varies a lot by brand. I'm amazed at how willing we are to bathe ourselves in chemicals corporations sell us, with such a long history of "oops, guess that was pretty toxic" behind us.
What? It's sterile. The Romans washed their clothes with it.
I hate that greasy feeling hand sanitizer gives you. And the smell puts me off.
Yes. On the urine, you get to pick asparagus or no asparagus.
I actually took survival medicine classes that included using urine to sterilise your improvised medical instruments. The lessons were full of cheerful anecdotes from the Pacific theatre of WW2 and the Korean War about people who had carried out ad hoc appendectomies or splinted their own broken spines before crawling to friendly lines.
14: Oh why play, just use Purell or the generic. 70% iso alcohol.
20 I hate to think of what your finals were like.
I once met a guy who had taken out his own appendix. I don't remember much about him because I was 7 at the time, but my parents clearly thought it was a big deal, and in the cold light of day I'm inclined to think they were right.
Wasn't there some Russian doctor at a research station in the Antarctic a few years back who had to do that. Hardcore.
More than a few years back, apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Rogozov
I think more recently where was a woman who had to biopsy her own breast.
Standards are clearly falling.
Most likely it's annoying because it is totally unnecessary. What life threatening disease has ever been prevented with hand sanitizer?
There's no hard evidence yet, but the hygiene hypothesis suggests that you're sacrificing short-term convenience (avoiding one little cold) for long-term bad outcomes (allergies or other immune disorders).
The ones that annoy me most are the parents swiping away at the shopping cart and the airplane tray table. I promise you your kid is not getting sick from the damn airplane tray table.
What life threatening disease has ever been prevented with hand sanitizer?
Well, in hospitals, doesn't it prevent infections? Cruise ships? But other than that, I'm with you.
I have more sympathy with the school, even though, as I note above, my son won't use sanitizer for pain-related reasons. "One little cold" in a kid means losing two or more nights of sleep for parents. At least it did for us when the boy was that age. Also, there are lots of gastrointestinal diseases and I thought avoiding those was more than half of the point of hand sanitizer.
Not that a cold meant we were awake the whole night, but it meant nobody was getting any uninterrupted sleep.
28. Norovirus isn't usually life threatening, but it's extremely unpleasant, especially if you're already ill.
31: People get uninterrupted sleep at your house? Adult people? (Just kidding, mostly. I have now had four nights in the last two weeks where no one came into my bed in the night. It's paradise! But none uninterrupted, I don't think.)
If I go drinking, I usually have wake up and pee before morning.
28: The only things I wipe are the shopping cart handles. The combination of dried and wet boogers left by previous shoppers is annoying.
||
Thorn, while you're here, are you still up for reading?
|>
35: So if it's one or the other, that's ok?
37: It's never one or the other when I go shopping except just after I sneeze on it as I leave it after loading the car.
36: Yes, sorry! I thought I'd responded that I didn't care when I got my assignment, which is maybe not helpful but true.
All good! Not helpful but true is the motto of the blog, yes?
I forgot. The animal shelter I frequent is big on sanitizers and the old fashioned soap+water routine before and after visiting the critters. Makes sense tho' I have no stats to measure illnesses avoided.
My motto is neither helpful nor true, but not actually painful most of the time.
34/35. Also, never put ice in your drink from the bucket on the bar. Many years ago I read a report where somebody had analysed the ice cubes from one pub and identified 19 different men's semen. I have tried to unlearn this but it is not possible.
41: In the dense hog barns of modern, industrial agriculture, you have to take a full show and put on special clothing before going to see the pigs.
45: There are no buckets of ice on the bar here.
47. Yes, but you might go somewhere where there are.
you have to take a full show and put on special clothing before going to see the pigs.
Can it be any show or does it have to be a Broadway production?
Tying 45 and 46 together, men are pigs. I wish I could unlearn 45 now too.
Mossy, I've signed up but am happy to be bumped if necessary.
45: It's practical magic for the dating demographic.
http://www.luckymojo.com/bodyfluids.html
Conversely, I've put down provisionally for 4 chapters, but having now started reading the book, if anybody wants to take two of them off me, that would meet with no resistance.
I'm going to deal with 45 by refusing to believe it. What kind of a bar were they sampling in?
45 actually sounds beyond gross into implausible, unless it was a particularly ejaculation-friendly bar.
Oh ye of little faith.
http://www.amazon.com/Semenology-Bartenders-Paul-Fotie-Photenhauer/dp/1482605228
That's going to get me some interesting Amazon suggested items.
In that case who wants to shoot for 20?
I'd guess that it was microscopic amounts of semen from guys who had jerked off and not washed their hands.
Probably plenty of feces in that bucket, too, for the same reason. On the one hand (heh): gross. On the other hand, you're basically consuming this stuff all the time whether you know it or not, and it's not hurting you.
plenty of feces in that bucket
Maybe for you, but those of us approaching 50 need a bit more than we did in our salad days.
Yeah, see, these things are viscerally gross, but 69 nails it: we're consuming them all the time in the least likely places. What gets you is never what you think will get you.
This topic always reminds me of the telephone sanitizers from Hitchhiker's Guide.
I sometimes try to clean my phone with an alcohol wipe or something.
If you don't get your fingers that dirty, you can use the little handiwipe they give you when you order wings.
61: Surprisingly, I have found that unlike cognac that grows better with age, Heavenly Cognac tastes best when made with the seminal fluids of a younger producer.
Prince, do you know the funny things that go
To make Your Majesty's champagne- but hold!
These are the things that people do not know.
They do not know because the are not told.
6: "hanitizer", according to the Calabat.
I believe the hygiene hypothesis relates more to allergies and access to the outdoors than it has anything to do with basic sanitation. If the hanitizers are just alcohol-based, I can't see much wrong with it. Preschoolers are basically Patient Zero for everything.
78
Nope. That's the sanitized version (forgive me). The hygiene hypothesis is about general exposure to infectious agents, not dirt, and there are even some indications that parasites played a role.
If that's the case, then why do we tell people to wash their hands after shitting?
80: the same reason we don't give people a full dose of active smallpox to inoculate them from that.
80: 'Cause there are optimum amounts of grody to the max things that stimulate the immune system without overwhelming it.
I think the hands of a preschooler are closer to a full dose of small pox than to a vaccine version of it. I was so sick that first year of preschool.
Let's not get all slippery slope. No one is suggesting we eat feces.
Scientific studies on hand sanitizer show minor and conflicting results, none of which are better than hand washing, and many are weaker.
Do they show any negative effects worse than hand washing?
Becoming Bubbleboy is unequivocally proven to reduce the likelihood of infections.
No one is suggesting we eat feces.
Be patient. The thread is young.
No one is suggesting we eat feces.
A friend of mine who works for the VA will be distributing poop in pill form to veterans with Crohn's Disease (I think it was Crohn's, could be wrong) to see if gut biome transplants are an effective mode of treatment--so some in the medical community are actually suggesting we (well, some of us) eat feces.
72 "I sometimes try to clean my phone with an alcohol wipe or something."
That's because we are all descended from the telephone sanitizers (etc.) on the "B" Ark.
I have heard that alcohol is bad for specifically iPhone screens, and they sell alcohol-free wipes for the purpose of cleaning them.
What about, "Hey kids, free ethanol"?
It's not allowed in the open on some psych wards, because the alcoholics will try to drink it.
Hand sanitizer is supposedly great at killing most things, but they aren't good at killing the rhinovirus. So you still need to wash your hands.
In traditional Asian cultures, the horn of a rhinovirus is believed to be an aphrodisiac.
The well-known transmission path of: no handwashing -- horn of rhinovirus -- ice bucket
One summer, I was trapped on an island where there was a gastrointestinal disease that was picking off the children one by one. Hand sanitizer was not enough to protect mine. I awoke the morning that we were supposed to leave, still hammered from the night before, to find him puking all over our room.