Alcohol-Based Hand Sanitizer Advice Outdated

In almost every recent news story about combating the H1N1 virus (a.k.a., "Swine Flu"), a health care professional (a.k.a., "the expert") is interviewed and asked to offer advice. In turn, the expert offers little more than a recap of CDC guidelines, including the recommendation that alcohol-based hand sanitizer should be used when soap and water is not available. While everyone at CLEANpHIRST™ agrees with the soap-and-water part, we take issue with the advice to use alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

Why? Because that recommendation is not based on the latest scientific data. Instead, it stems from the CDC's own failure to develop/select a sporicidal protocol for measuring the effectiveness of the alcohol-free foam hand sanitizer available from CLEANpHIRST™.

If the CDC would develop and/or select a sporicidal protocol for measuring the effectiveness of hand sanitizer, they would find Alcohol-Free Foam Hand Sanitizer more effective than the leading alcohol-based hand sanitizer products in several ways.

For instance, they would find hand sanitizer to be an extremely-safe, effective, non-irritating, non-flammable and non-staining alternative to alcohol-based hand sanitizer that kills well beyond the level of the leading alcohol-based hand sanitizers on the market (i.e., 99.999 percent kill rate against Staphylococcus aureus).

Furthermore, they would find the following statements to be true:

hand sanitizer is the only hand sanitizer proven effective against both strains of Norovirus;

The active ingredient in hand sanitizer, benzalkonium chloride (BZK), has been proven effective against H1N1 (a.k.a.,”Swine Flu”) in one scientific study;

hand sanitizer provides up to 30 minutes of protection on the skin, and that compares to alcohol, the active ingredient in the 21-year-old technology of the leading products, which evaporates from the skin within 10 seconds of application; and

Unlike the leading alcohol-based products, hand sanitizer has not had tight new restrictions placed on it by state fire marshals and, in turn, at places like the University of Michigan.

Editor's Note to Journalists: If you wrote one of the articles below or you've written other article(s) about hand sanitizer, please contact us at info (at) CLEANpHIRST (dot) com or via the comments section below to learn more for your next story about hand sanitizer:

Labels: cleanphirst, H1N1 Swine Flu, Hand Sanitizer, school cleaning