"Hand Sanitizers, Good or Bad?"

Dear Author,

We all use hand sanitizers almost everyday in our very busy lives. Who has time to stop and wash their hands with good old soap and water? But as it turns out our beloved hand sanitizers may not be good enough. In reality we do not really need hand sanitizer at all. The more we use it the more we are going to cause bacteria to become resistant to it.

"Hand Sanitizers, Good or Bad" makes a good case as to why hand sanitizers with over 60% alcohol are good and helpful, but what they fail to mention is all the other effects hand sanitizers have on our bodies. We need to go back to the good old days when plain old soap and water was good enough to prevent microbes from becoming resistant to everything we have. If this happens we are going to be in more trouble than if we hadn't used hand sanitizer in the first place!

In the article "Hand Sanitizers, Good or Bad", the experiment done by Mr. Reynolds showed most of the sanitizers we use are not killing microbes at all, rather they mobilize the bacteria, spreading them around the hand instead of killing them"(Franklin pg.1). The hand sanitizer the students used in the experiment only contained 40% ethyl alcohol. With anything less than this the microbes are not being killed properly. We cannot continue using hand sanitizers with higher alcohol volumes because eventually nothing is going to work. The researchers in the article do say that using soap and water in the best option, but I think we need to avoid hand sanitizers as much as possible. The public needs to realize even though they think they are helping by "washing" their hands constantly with hand sanitizers they could still possibly be spreading microbes because they did not kill them.

I can see where the public is coming from by trying to keep themselves perfectly clean all the time, but some microbes are needed to help maintain our immune systems. If we constantly clean our environment we are never going to give our bodies a chance to come in contact with all the microbes in the world. The children of the last couple of generations are going to have weaker immune systems because they have not been exposed to the microbes in the first place. The hand sanitizers are going to create super microbes that can live through anything thrown at them. Eventually if we continue using higher and higher concentrations of alcohol the bacteria are going to become resistant to all of the hand sanitizers.

Sincerely, Julie