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Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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... )

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

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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)

>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

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