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by ulrikrasmussen 691 days ago
Are you sure? This article claims that we are seeing bacteria evolve to better tolerate alcohols: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322646#Alcohol-res...
1 comments

The paper is titled ” Increasing tolerance of hospital Enterococcus faecium to _handwash_ alcohols” [1]. They’re tolerating small concentrations of alcohol used in hand sanitizer, not a concentrated disinfectant.

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aar6115

Thank you for the interesting article!

The response letter at the bottom- “Is the effectiveness of alcohol-based handrubs against enterococci really compromised?” by INGEBORG SCHWEBKE has some interesting counterpoints and implies they used 23% isopropanol instead of 70%, which is not enough to sterilize.

The concentration of alcohol in hand sanitizers is like 70%, not small.