Benzene detected in hand sanitizers
valisure.com
valisure.com
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.
Now I see it at the entrance of most businesses / by checkout registers.
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.
There are people who have occasion to use hand sanitizer for reasons unrelated to COVID.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4
Seems like an easy case where hindsight is 20/20.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!” tweeted Dr. Jerome Adams, the U.S. Surgeon General, on Feb. 29. “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!” In an interview with Fox & Friends, Adams said that wearing a mask can even increase your risk of getting the virus. “Folks who don’t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus.”
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.
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.
Personally, I've decided to remove most "products" from my life, as much as possible, and I feel much better for it.
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?
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.
instead of regulation, let's just promote soap over sanitizer, which is as effective against pathogens without the unintended side-effects.
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... )
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.
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)
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
Number of times I have saved someone's life with this trivia: zero, but still hopeful.
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.
Doctors here advise to use soap over hand sanitizers if there's water available. But now there's another problem, all these obsessive hand wash with soap is making the skin dry[1] and causing other skin problems.
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/198-hand-wash-liquid-which-does... (Disclaimer: It's a problem validation platform I built).
I'll be really interested if i can avoid warm water.
Beyond the citation though, it makes logical sense. The mechanism for sanitation is that the soap itself destroys the bacteria. This mechanism works regardless of temperature. Cold water + Soap should be just fine as long as your hands are otherwise visibly clean.
In the food industry, we were required to use high temperature water. This was presumably to remove actual surface contaminants (dirt, grease, other food contaminants) rather than for actual sanitation. That's why you might still see guidelines for using hotter water temperatures.
I've always been taught it's the latter. Soaping your hands, and not rinsing will not sanitize them, you'll just end up with dirty, soapy hands.
Cdc agrees:
https://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/faqs.html
> Is it better to use warm water or cold water?
> Use your preferred water temperature – cold or warm – to wash your hands. Warm and cold water remove the same number of germs from your hands. The water helps create soap lather that removes germs from your skin when you wash your hands. Water itself does not usually kill germs; to kill germs, water would need to be hot enough to scald your hands.
Soap helps break down/encapsulate/dissolve oils/fat that aren't readily soluble in just water.
Especially once lipids get involved (almost all hydrophobic), especially in combination with other types of substances like oil soaked dirt or dead skin (like what you get on a doorknob at the micro level), it just doesn’t work the same way on the same timescales with colder temps - it fundamentally can’t, chemistry doesn’t work that way. [https://www.chemguide.co.uk/physical/basicrates/temperature....]
If you want the same speed of reaction - aka same amount of oil converted to a not oil - with lower temps (and hence lower molecular velocities and less Brownian motion) you need more reactive chemicals and more aggressive physical action to get compound A in contact with compound B enough to have the reaction you need. It’s as true for soap as it is for anything else.
And this all of course has a giant * on it, since above a certain point the energy in the system causes parts of it to disassociate or form unwanted side reactions, so there is a limit where it ‘blows apart’, ‘crashes’, or ‘can’t stick’ to extend the analogy. I can’t think of any soap that would have that problem at temps within human ‘not going to immediately get 3rd degree burns’ ranges.
Also depends on how cold your cold water is... ours is under 10C.
Probably unnecessary to do a perfect job for an unstable respiratory virus. Skin-colonizing bacteria is a different story.
I take 3 parts everclear with 1 part water. Mix, and put in spray bottles.
That's an alcohol concentration of .95*.75 = 71.25%
That's within the WHO's recommendations for concentrations from 70%-80%
It can be sprayed on your hands, surfaces, food, etc. And since it's all food-grade products, is safe (well, as much Everclear is "safe"!).
(You can also modify the recipe by using 3 parts everclear with 1 part food-grade aloe vera, for a lasting hydrating effect especially on the hands. Make sure you're not allergic to aloe before doing this. Anaphylactic shock is no laughing matter.)
A weekly argument in college.
We're on our 3rd handle, at a total cost of $90. And considering my SO is in the health field working with potential covid-positive indivuals, we consider this to have been well worth whatever we've paid in taxes. I'm sure other states have higher taxes. Thankfully we're not in one of those.
I'd just keep the everclear 151 as is, since as you recognize already is at 75%.
(From what I understand, too high doesn't destroy the rna, and too low can't penetrate the lipid layer).
I don't need the 190 proof (95%), but it sure would be nice to be able to get some of the 150 (75%). Does anyone know of a source that can ship to CA?
I’ve been using it daily ever since, and have even used it to refill the bottle of sanitizer in my car.
Later today I am shipping it off to Valisure to be tested.
They noted high variability in concentrations from batch to batch that they tested, so I’m hoping I got “lucky”.
Edit: by "lucky", I mean I hope my sanitizer was not contaminated or the contamination was minimal, obviously! Odd I even need to state this.
[1] https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-u...
The US couldn’t form a cohesive strategy around this and fell into a partisan fight over whether to lockdown at all, leading to a perpetual half-implemented lockdown, the worst of all options. If we choose to do a retrospective on the value of lockdowns, we should bear in mind that “perpetually” is not the only way to use them.
thankfully yes, sanity prevailed.
WTF government, this is why many of us don't trust you.
Either they're "preventing life-improving sanitizer from reaching citizens in a time of need", or they're "poisoning citizens" by letting through just a tiny bit of byproduct that would be MUCH more common if they weren't taking a regulatory role.
This is an apparatus solving a complex, high-dimensional system of equations, not as academic test for which there's a real "right answer", no? * shrug *
It is volatile. It won't spend much time in your hand. You won't breathe a significant amount of it. You aren't ingesting it.
"Oh but Benzene is carcinogenic" yes, it's also present in Whisky, in a bread slice that was left too long in the toaster, etc.
> The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set a permissible exposure limit of 1 part of benzene per million parts of air (1 ppm) in the workplace during an 8-hour workday
That’s the problem: people do. Can be an issue on some hospital units, even when you add the bitter stuff to it.
2ppm isn't a lot, and it is a temporary measure. Benzene can be absorbed through the skin but most of it evaporates off (as hand sanitizer is intended to do) before it is absorbed.
So yeah. The FDA reasonably updating guidelines to make sure people can buy hand sanitizer during a global pandemic is probably better than the fraction of a percent increased risk of cancer.
In this case, my primary issue isn't with the 2ppm of benzene itself, it's with the race to quickly and quietly change it in the first place. The FDA (and the Feds in general) move glacially on important topics but when their buddies in the ethanol fuel business need something, they jump to loosen regulations to make production easier.
A. There is a long standing conspiracy between the FDA and ethanol plants to sell adulterated hand sanitizer.
B. There is a global pandemic and given that emergency the FDA set aside normal regulations to expedite local antiseptic production.
Did you know roasted coffee beans contain similar carcinogenic compounds at similar levels (0.5 to 1ppm)?
You should absolutely wash hands too, but there are a lot of reasons for portable hand sanitizers.
the amount of friction presented by washing likely produces a more ideal balance between considerations like infection reduction, evolutionary pressure, and hypochondria/mysophobia inducement. the simple rule of thumb is to wash around waste, food prep/consumption, and illness. more than that, especially most sanitizer use because it's mostly outside of these situations, is likely a net-negative.
It dissolves the lipid shell and denatures key proteins in the shell. This is not subtle.
In the evolutionary influence perspective for a microbe, it also still isn’t particularly common. Triclosan and the other problematic chemicals are much more targeted and more problematic from a resistance perspective because of it.
A number of them have been made from the heads and tails of normal spirit distillation process (which are waste products), or are distilled with other organic waste products (like dog food process waste), which often smell awful and are super sticky.
We bought another gallon from a cosmetics supply wholesaler and it was much less stinky.
Coronavirus is a virus and isn’t alive. The alcohol disrupts the outer lipid layer which deactivates the virus. So 70% doesn’t apply here.
I have a 2 year supply of isopropyl alcohol now. I hoarded last year and have way more than I will need because I stopped cleaning groceries and washing down countertops because I stopped believing it did anything. But better save than sorry!
Evidence that Covid spreads through surfaces is sparse and that route of transmission is no longer emphasized by the CDC https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4.
While the IFR of COVID varies, it appears to be below 1% for most regions of the world, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v.... Could anyone who is more informed than me estimate what the increased mortality would be for those who religiously use hand sanitizer with this level of benzene? My guess is still lower than COVID but I have no reference point.
Nonetheless, other things are transmitted by unclean hands, which is almost certainly a greater risk than the benzene.
Comparing deaths caused by COVID to deaths caused by contaminated hand sanitizer isn't a fair comparison.
Comparing lives saved by hand sanitizer to lives lost to sanitizer contamination is what I'm reading here, though it seems pretty difficult to measure either.
Some times the world is counterintuitive, and the only way to find something out is to test it. While it probably is not the case there may be poor outcomes from hand sanitizer. Would they be worse than CoVid, probably not. However given the scope of CoVid all we have to do to test this is wait. If hand sanitizer was to cause that much trouble it would become obvious at scale.
As I said, my guess is that the risk of surface-transmission of COVID is probably still greater than the risk of increased exposure to benzene. But I think given the low risk of surface transmission, it might still be worth a comparison.
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200817/toxic-methanol-in-h...
One of the hand sanitizers that was tested had as much as 16.1ppm benzene. That's not great, as it's believed that some small portion of benzene a person is exposed to can be absorbed through the skin, but... yeah. 16.1ppm.
Gasoline can contain on average 0.62% benzene, and it evaporates quite quickly. Gasoline vapor is genuinely dangerous to human health. (demonstrably less so now that we've stopped putting tetraethyl lead in it, but still)
I guess the sampling methodology is key if you’re trying to learn anything about overall risk to the public. 92% of the batches sampled had levels that were within FDA guidelines, but unless we know how representative those samples are in terms of market share, it really tells us very little. 16ppm seems crazy high though.
Always worth bearing in mind the general principle of taking only the minimum effective dose of anything; you’re trying to sanitise your hands, not strip your epidermis away through carpet bombing.
It’s instant chaos with screaming and yelling from the kid and a frantic search for a bathroom from the parents.
So maybe a taste that ain’t completely awful would be an improvement.
2. Usually the idea is that you make it taste bad so that people ain't tempted to ingest it (or quickly learn not to). Same reason why compressed air cans have bittering agents: so that people don't huff 'em.
Seriously, there are a lot of places around the world where there won’t be any way to ensure that you don’t have cancer hand sanitizer.
Although now you’ve got flammable hands, so perhaps not. What a terrible situation.
Good catch though!
Only 4 products of the hundreds they tested had a concentration greater than 5ppb.
- artnaturals hand sanitizer SCENT FREE NATURAL ELEMENTS + CLEANSING FORMULA - 16.1ppb
- SS LAVENDER & HERBS scented sanitizer ALCOHOL ANTISEPTIC 70% - 13.8ppb
- huangjisoo HAND SANITIZER GEL TYPE HAND CLEANSER 62% THANOL 91% ORGANIC - 11.4ppb
- TrueWash Instant Hand Sanitizer Natural - 6.2ppb
Those four hand sanitizers are listed at the below link with those metrics at PPM (parts per million), not PPB (parts per billion).
https://www.valisure.com/wp-content/uploads/Valisure-FDA-Cit...
Is it worse to sanitize with 16ppm sanitizer or drink 5ppb water?
This study indicates that ~0.25% of benzene permeates skin. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6531855/
Sounds like benzene on skin may be 400x less dangerous than the same quantity ingested.
I've no idea how they determine safe ranges for these chemicals, but as an engineer, I'm thinking if I were to do something like this, I'd leave some wiggle room. Like if I say 5ppm is safe, but if noticeable amount of people get leukemia with 10ppm, I would consider my job failed. Because 5ppm, although is safe, is too close to the danger zone therefore is not practical. So I'd guess small perturbations around 5ppm would not have noticeable affects (again, I'm a total layman, this is a question, not a claim).
The kinetics of benzene in drinking water are very different than in hand sanitizer. Carcinogens in general have different risk profiles than other toxins like heavy metals or poisons because localized concentrations can be just as dangerous since a tumor can form and metastasize pretty much anywhere. Asbestos, for example, is much less dangerous in drinking water than in the air because the lubrication provided by water significantly reduces the physical damage caused by the fibers.
Benzene (probably [1]) bioaccumulates in skin far more readily than in the digestive tract where the water is a diluting agent that reduces the probability of the benzene sticking around in the body. Since there is a lot less volume of blood flow in the tiny capillaries near the skin and hand sanitizer is designed to evaporate, there's a far higher risk of carcinogenic concentrations of benzene building up, especially around cuts or lesions.
It's very plausible that a few mL of sanitizer with ppb concentrations of benzene can accumulate in small microliter pockets of tissue with concentrations in the 10s or 100s of ppm if continually applied throughout the day for months on end. Throw in the rapid pace of reproduction of skin cells and that's a legitimate cause for concern.
[1] last I looked, it wasn't well studied in humans, but since benzene is a solvent and known to accumulate in leaves and bark, it strongly implies it has the same effect up and down the food chain.
This is some BS. The US needs to get its chemicals oversight, regulations, and enforcement up to European standards. TSCA is just one example of horrible laws that permit poisons.
Their business model is to do their own analysis of drugs at their pharmacy.
Could this be related?
Has anyone had a similar experience?
I've found that hand sanitizer triggers it. Sounds weird, but I'm pretty sure, as I went on and off sanitizer about 4 times during this pandemic and I noticed the symptom come and go every time.