It's maddening to see wrong information widely disseminated and being barely able to correct it. Sure, you can post on social media or write blog posts but the juggernaut of news media and the cost of being able to reach people en masse makes the whole enterprise quite frustrating!
I'll lay my cards on the table, I have a commercial interest in selling you all non alcohol sanitiser. For close to ten years before anyone had even heard of Covid I was pushing the advantage of alcohol free products in medical settings. Still, just because I would like everyone to buy our alcohol free sanitiser doesn't make what I'm saying about it wrong!
Take a look at this article from The British Medical Journal
One excerpt that is pretty shocking
"In the UK alone, alcohol-based hand sanitiser poisonings reported to the National Poisons Information Service (NPIS) rose by 157% between 2019 and 2020, from 155 (January 1 to September 16) to 398 (January 1 to September 14). "
Sure, it is obvious when you consider the vast increase in hand sanitiser from early 2019 through to the end of 2020. The shocking bit is that the deaths are all unnecessary.
Alcohol is only one way of controlling the spread of germs transmitted by touch and it is objectively speaking not even the best, it is simply the best known. When the pandemic began the government adopted some very simple messaging that happened to not be true. Using a misread of the WHO guidance on alcohol hand sanitiser it managed to convince most of the population that the ONLY way to sanitiser your hands was either soap or alcohol.
Everyone is now familiar with alcohol hand sanitiser, its in every shop and in most homes and businesses across the UK. People are familiar with the terrible smell and if you use it often then you are familiar with how old and wrinkled your hands look now. If you are unlucky enough to suffer from sensitive skin or eczema then you are doubtless in an even worse situation. On top of this alcohol hand sanitiser is far less effective at tackling pathogens than the alternatives. Sure, it is fine for coronavirus but is useless against Norovirus; it's fine for E.Coli but it shows poor effectiveness against MRSA. The truth is that there is NO advantage of using alcohol sanitiser vs alcohol free alternatives.
In fact, alcohol free sanitiser foam is twice as efficient as a gel which means you get at least double the uses from an equivalent sized bottle of gel. Your 5 litre of Serenity Hand Sanitiser Foam is worth at least 10 litres of alcohol gel which is kind of useful if you have to store a lot of hand sanitiser (cruise ships for example) not to mention the fact that alcohol sanitiser is VERY flammable and Serenity Hand Sanitiser is completely non flammable.
So, in summary, alcohol free sanitiser is skin safe even for sensitive skin and eczema sufferers, it is more effective at destroying viruses, fungus and bacteria than any concentration of alcohol, it is safer to store and it is cheaper per use and most importantly there are 398 deaths in 2020 that could have been prevented had it been in use.