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Comment by scottrogowski | Hacker News Reader

I'd be curious to see whether we actually see an uptick in cancers in the coming months/years. If so, I wonder whether it will turn out that using hand sanitizer resulted in a net increase or decrease in overall mortality.

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.

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I suspect spending a few minutes near a gas station may expose you to more benzene than a year of using this stuff...

Seriously, more than a year.

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'm getting this strange vibe from your comment that somehow sanitizer-induced cancer might be a greater problem than COVID, which doesn't agree with common sense if you ask me. What am I missing here?

They didn't say it's a worse problem than covid. They said it might be a worse problem than getting covid from touching stuff, since that turned out to be way less common than airborne droplet transmission.

I think the proposal is that sanitizer induces more risk than it mitigates, since it's now unlikely that hand sanitation is related to covid transmission.

Nonetheless, other things are transmitted by unclean hands, which is almost certainly a greater risk than the benzene.

That's because it's not common sense to compare sanitizer-induced cancer rates to overall COVID rates. To determine whether the use of hand sanitizer is a net positive, you have to compare the deaths caused by hand sanitizer to the deaths prevented by hand sanitizer. Unfortunately, it would be pretty difficult to get accurate numbers for either of those figures, even if you just narrow it down to cancer and COVID.

But problem is that people getting sanitiser cancer are maybe not the ones who would be dying because corona. If old people are at great risk you can not tell whole population for to do something risking cancers to protecting them. I am young enough and at very very low risk of deaths from corona so am not desiring for to use sanitizer and for to maybe getting benzene cancers.

That's not quite what they were comparing.

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.

Limiting action when things fly in the face of common sense is wise. Limiting the questions you ask to common sense is not always wise.

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.

Common sense is usually wrong WRT statistics.

I agree with most of the other replies to your comment. The world is full of counter-intuitives and I'm genuinely curious about whether this is one.

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.

What you're missing is relative risk vs absolute risk. Don't worry, this is a common mistake.

There's also a problem with people intentionally drinking hand sanitizer to get a buzz:

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200817/toxic-methanol-in-h...

Most hand sanitizers contain a bitter substance to prevent exactly this.

Works for some, but not those that want to drink it.

also curious if we'll see whether immune systems have been weakened or not by over sanitization.

Given what Ioannidis did with Santa Clara seroprevalence data I’m not sure he’s to be trusted here

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