[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.