[spqr0a1]

In case anyone is wondered why there is benzene in hand sanitizer: Ethanol forms an azeotrope with water, which makes it impossible to dry completely without further processing. Benzene forms its own azeotrope with water at an even lower boiling point which allows for cheaply drying ethanol by further distillation; With the, in this case inconvenient, side effect of residual benzene contamination. Now you don't actually need dry ethanol for hand sanitizer, but the production capacity for fuel-grade ethanol is way larger than pharmaceutical or food grade.

[lumost]

The contamination problem in common household products seems like something either the FDA/USDA/EPA should be monitoring.

I can understand someone seeing an opportunity for making cheaper sanitizer and not recognizing the benzene risk they were passing on to customers. Given that this person probably didn't even know they should be testing for benzene - I don't see how the industry could self-regulate benzene presence in hand sanitizers. Even if this became an issue, I wouldn't be surprised to see benzene-free labels slapped on benzene contaminated sanitizer by virtue of incompetence.

Are there any agencies currently tasked with randomly sampling products that consumers come into contact with for contamination?

[_jal]

Self-regulation without any compliance verification is called a polite request.

If people would like to see this sort of thing actually work, that requires real regulation. The kind you see when important people actually care about outcomes, not the PR management you see for, e.g., the food supply.

[clairity]

if any regulation should be enacted, it's to restrict sanitizer use to waste handling, food prep, and healthcare use, which is where it may actually do some good reducing infection transmission, not in everyday activities where it's merely a potentially dangerous evolution-inducing palliative.

instead of regulation, let's just promote soap over sanitizer, which is as effective against pathogens without the unintended side-effects.

[lukeschlather]

Sanitizer is simply inferior to soap. Professionals in waste, food prep, and healthcare should really never use sanitizer, they should just provide sinks and soap.

[thaeli]

In healthcare settings hand sanitizer can actually be superior to soap and water: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/PDF/rr/rr5116.pdf#page=19

[clairity]

i actually generally agree with that assessment, although i can see instances where sanitizer can be useful, like changing a series of diapers at a daycare, or servers at a restaurant.

[bawolff]

Those seem like places where hand sanitizer only would be especially inapropriate.

Pretty sure that food prep people using only hand sanitizer would be a healthcode violation in many places (e.g. some googling found https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/industry/agriculture-seaf... )

[bawolff]

Why would hand-sanitizer be evolution inducing (beyond the way any stressor is)?

This isn't an antibiotic,its really hard to imagine microorganisms spontaneously evolving to be resistant to alcohol in the near term.

[dragonwriter]

> This isn't an antibiotic,its really hard to imagine microorganisms spontaneously evolving to be resistant to alcohol in the near term.

sensitivity to alcohol has some distribution, but there’s relatively little fitness advantage to being on the low end without the artificial environmental pressure.

Murder a randomly chosen half of people who reach sexual maturity at less than the median height for people doing so at their age for a couple decades and people will “spontaneously evolve” to be taller; and microorganisms have much shorter generations.

[bawolff]

> Murder a randomly chosen half of people who reach sexual maturity at less than the median height for people doing so at their age for a couple decades and people will “spontaneously evolve” to be taller; and microorganisms have much shorter generations.

But its pretty unlikely they would develop bullet proof heads in a couple decades, which i think would be the more apt comparison

Alcohol has been used to sanitize since the 1300s. Evolving resistence to alcohol seems like something that would be difficult to do (but not impossible as evidenced by some types of pathogens are resistant). Anyways i think this concern is overblown for alcohol based sanitizer due to the method of action of alcohol. (My opinion on triclosan based sanitizer otoh is totally different)

[lumost]

We see similar patterns in food production and consumer staples. See lead prevalence in baby food, toys, and clothing for examples of other problematic contamination.

[hguant]

>The contamination problem in common household products seems like something either the FDA/USDA/EPA should be monitoring

It is - I believe that literally all imports of hand sanitizer from Mexico are subject to an emergency order requiring sampling/testing because of the prevalence of contaminates

[adonovan]

Our high-school chemistry teacher told us that if one ever needs to party in a lab, mix orange juice with the 97% ethanol, but avoid the 99%. The former is distilled with water, but the latter with benzene.

Number of times I have saved someone's life with this trivia: zero, but still hopeful.

[0xbadcafebee]

Stupid question: would 99% alcohol (as in for cleaning electronic parts) also potentially have the benzene residue?

[VLM]

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.

[oasisbob]

Nature 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

Seems like an easy case where hindsight is 20/20.

[dimal]

Except 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?

[paulmd]

Fauci more or less came out and said that the CDC's public recommendations at that time were not based on the science available to them, but were an action-driven measure to preserve the available PPE supplies for healthcare workers, as in the depths of the early pandemic they were dangerously depleted.

To put it another way, they lied to the public to keep the masks where they could do the most good.

https://news.yahoo.com/fauci-confirms-public-health-experts-...

You can equivocate about what is "enough evidence" that masks are effective and whether that threshold had been reached yet (you can always collect more evidence, but when people are dying it's not bad to make some guesses that it probably is airborne/aerosol and masks will help). But the Surgeon-General went as far as to claim that the science showed that masks were not effective. That the science was in and it showed that masks did not prevent transmission among the general public - which is different from "not enough evidence to conclusively say yet".

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/29/health/face-masks-coronavirus...

The USG's actions here were medically unethical - they misrepresented the benefits and dangers of an intervention in order to manipulate the patient's behavior. Maybe it's justifiable under the circumstances but at best it's shady.

I think under a different president it probably would have gone differently. But it doesn't change the responsibilities of the medical professionals involved here - you don't get to abdicate your ethical vows just because the president tells you to.

[harry8]

It's just so incredibly bad. People stop believing the CDC. I have. Without solid evidence what the CDC say is not something to take account of. I can't really get too upset about anti-vaxxers believing what I consider to be dangerous (to all of us) nonsense.

At some point you can't understand all the evidence for some given proposition. That's a different point for each of us depending on what we've studied, the proposition etc. At some point we have to rely on some kind of authority in the belief that they won't tell lies because if they did there would be dire consequences for the people involved. Even when we check the evidence we don't personally check the lab to see if the evidence is faked.

Anti-vaxxers and their ilk look at current medical experts as the authority and call bullshit. If I can't make an argument from evidence to them because it won't be persuasive to that individual all I can do is say, well yes, but not /this/ time. They wouldn't lie again this time like they did before. But they would if it suited their purpose, they've shown that. So I don't think they have an ulterior purpose this time. Not super convincing is it? So we're left with attacking the anti-vaxxer "science" as BS. From evidence. Which can be difficult to make convincing to some people. Meh. Anti-vaxxers is just one example in one field that shows the effect. There are so many. "They'd even lie to us about how to be safe in a damn pandemic!" Yeah they would. They did.

I'll put an estimate on the marginal impact on loss of life from that masks don't work lie. More than one life lost that would not have been if the lie was not told. More than one is sufficient. Feel free to tighten the estimate to how much more than one.

Fauci, yep. I'd cross the road to avoid him which he wouldn't care about at all as he soaks up the adulation he so clearly craves. It's easy to criticize from the comfort of obscurity under zero pressure compared to what he must have faced but that doesn't mean we must keep silent. To hell with him. He has no business remaining in public life making and influencing decisions because he is a liar of the worst kind. Disagree with me by all means, but if /you/ see that as an attack on the Democrats in favor of Republicans (or Russia, or China) you're not much better yourself when it comes to undermining the credibility of genuine expertise.

[vkou]

> 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]

Up until around April or so, the CDC was explicitly saying they did not recommend the general public wear masks. For example, here's a tweet from the end of February:

https://twitter.com/cdcgov/status/1233134710638825473

[vkou]

Please read the tweet you linked:

> CDC does not currently recommend the use of facemasks to help prevent novel #coronavirus.

Please note the emphasized word.

The CDC is not saying don't wear masks. The CDC is not saying masks fail to prevent the spread of the virus. The CDC is saying that you wearing a mask is not likely to protect you from catching it.

If you are reading that tweet and interpreting that as "don't wear masks", you are not putting enough emphasis on protecting the people around you.

[plank_time]

It’s not incorrect. N95 works. Saying it is unlikely is a flat out lie. And the absurdity of saying that is what broke the trust of the government officials early on the pandemic. It’s a crime for them to have said that.

[darkwater]

There 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.

[tzs]

> 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.

[rarefied_tomato]

The 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]

Though 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]

If 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.

[asveikau]

Anecdotally, hand sanitizer is quite popular in places I come across in San Francisco. Some businesses require a squirt of it at entry.

[fho]

It's basically mandatory in every grocery store in Germany ... and every other store follows suit.

[asveikau]

Even 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.)

[hedora]

Hand 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.

[TedDoesntTalk]

Where I live in the US, I've never seen any business require hand sanitizer use.

[aarongolliver]

(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.

[wkearney99]

In 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.

[dividedbyzero]

In 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)

[SilverRed]

You could bring your own known safe bottle. I really doubt they would mind as long as they see you use something.

[bayswater2p]

I'm not convinced by your powerful suggestion that simply caling it inconvenient is doing us justice...

[fuzzfactor]

IME with industrial alcohols, different entities will have different amounts of leeway and with ethanol in particular in the US there are some of the most bizarre regulations.

Natural agricultural ethanol or distilled beverage grade ethanol is highly taxable by numerous agressive collectors so major obstacles to industrial use have long been overcome by _denaturing_ the otherwise natural grain alcohol, by adding a poisonous or disagreeable substance to discourage consumption and therefore avoiding any beverage taxes.

Different denaturants are expected to be used for different end uses of the ethanol, but fundamentally anything (on the list) will do since the primary motivation is taxation/regulatory not function/purpose.

Here is the list, some in the Specially Denatured Alcohol (SDA) category are also approved for personal use by the FDA:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/21.151

Notice that using plain gasoline (leaded) as well as unleaded for denaturant will introduce some benzene to the ethanol since gasoline almost always contains at least a fraction of a percent benzene naturally.

Also, the alternative _High Octane Denaturant Blend_ for CDA20 would be just fine having up to 1.1 percent benzene:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/21.112-T3

Now the Acetaldehyde _denaturant_ that could be used to exempt an industrial alcohol from beverage tax is actually often found naturally in lower-grade less-refined agricultural ethanol, so it originates like an ordinary non-beverage solvent. Once this type material arrives in a common bulk fuel terminal, often it will then be further denatured with a few percent of some fairly high-octane gasoline, carefully measured from a nearby tank. Since the Fuel-Grade ethanol they will be distributing has a maximum 2.5 percent additional denaturant allowed, and the gasoline is lower cost per gallon than the raw ethanol.

The final fuel grade ethanol spec allows 0.06 percent benzene or about 600 ppm:

http://www.cvec.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/PRODUCT-DATA-...

Notice that anhydrous ethanol is not a consideration along this supply chain, up to 1 percent water is allowed in the ethanol that is going to be blended with gasoline for clean-air purposes. Also I was the one who originally proposed the use of method E-1064 for this precision measurement when we were drafting this specification to begin with.

Seems to me like some sanitizer formulators are using fuel-grade ethanol sometimes whether they know it or not, or maybe trying to avoid mere automotive products and using a more carefully specified SDA material.

But a version of SDA28A consisting of highly purified ethanol having only pure Heptane as denaturant could be obtained completely benzene-free, while a different version of SDA28A containing conventional gasoline as denaturant would be expected to contain both benzene and lead.