Keep your hands safe: Make sure your hand sanitiser has 70 per cent alcohol content

Dr Vikas Sharma

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OUR hands are repositories for micro-organisms. The risk of disease and infections like Covid-19 gets greatly reduced by timely washing or appropriately sanitising the hands. Handwashing, which removes germs from your skin, remains the best way to protect against coronavirus and other pathogens.

Washing hands with water and using hand sanitisers help to remove or destroy potentially harmful micro-organisms. If soap and water are not available, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention recommends using alcohol-based hand sanitisers containing at least 60 per cent alcohol. Hand sanitisers are drugs, which come in gel, foam and liquid formulations. These kill most germs but do not remove them from your skin. Alcohol rub sanitisers kill most bacteria and stop some viruses. If the sanitiser bottle contains at least 70 per cent alcohol, it can kill 99.9 per cent of the micro-organisms on hands in 30 seconds.

Dos

• The alcohol in hand sanitiser works best when you rub it all over your hands, making sure to get it between your fingers and on the back of your hands.
• Do not wipe or rinse off the sanitiser before it is dry.
• Do not use the sanitiser if your hands are visibly dirty or greasy; wash your hands with soap and water instead.
• To properly coat your hands, you need to apply about 3 ml of sanitiser (more than half a teaspoon).
• Check the bottle for active ingredients. It might say ethyl alcohol, ethanol, isopropanol or some other chemical. All those are fine. But make sure that whichever of those alcohols is listed, its concentration is between 60 and 95 per cent. An alcohol concentration under 60 per cent won’t kill the microbes.
• Hand sanitisers can be useful if you have no soap or water around but if you have the latter, then go for the good old option.
• Check the labels on the bottle mentioning the constituents.
• Water is an essential ingredient of healthy skin. If the top layer gets too dry, skin can become itchy, scaly, inflamed and leathery. Adequately moisturise your hands.

Don’ts

• Excessive and overuse of alcohol-based sanitisers can weaken the skin and remove benign bacteria that fend off norovirus and other pathogens. Such cases were nearly six times more at risk for outbreaks of norovirus, which causes most cases of acute gastroenteritis.
• Sanitising one’s hands too many times can abrade the skin, which normally acts as a barrier to keep moisture in and harmful agents out.
• The skin of the hands can become painfully dry and cracked by over-usage of hand sanitisers. All this can cause micro-breaks in your skin because your skin is dry. Although the coronavirus primarily enters the body through the eyes, nose, and mouth, skin micro-breaks or skin fissures may cause other kinds of discomfort.
• Sanitiser overuse can compromise the skin barrier. The alcohol base that makes these products effective can be irritating to the skin. Alcohol strips the skin barrier of essential proteins and lipids, resulting in irritation and dryness.
• Sanitisers don’t clean off food residue. Fats and sugar deposits don’t vanish from your hands even if you sanitise your hands. Use soap and water to wash them away.
• Smelling too much sanitiser can cause a serious headache or a migraine. Nausea and vomiting can also happen when inhaling fumes from the sanitiser.
• Over usage of some hand sanitisers is harmful due to the presence of certain ingredients in them: Triclosan, an active ingredient in some sanitisers, if used in excess contributes to making bacteria resistant to antibiotics. Using hand sanitisers with high concentration of this ingredient may actually lower your resistance to diseases by killing the good bacteria.
• Another ingredient in hand sanitisers, bisphenol, if used in excess, can be dangerous as it can cause hormone disorders, heart disease, infertility, and even diabetes.
• Commonly used hand sanitisers contain chemicals that increase the ability of certain compounds to penetrate deep under the skin. Chemicals like bisphenol linger on the skin. If a person eats right after applying sanitiser on his/her hands, he/she would be effectively getting a double dose of the chemical, once through the skin and the second time by eating it.
• Triclosan in higher quantities can affect the immune function.
• Atopics or those having hand dermatitis or eczemas, palmar psoriasis should avoid using hand sanitisers as their existing skin cell disturbances can get aggravated.

— The writer is chief consultant dermatologist, National Skin Hospital, Mansa Devi Complex