How Hand Sanitizer Could Be Ruining Your Health

For the germaphobes around the world, you’ll find many of them carrying around a bottle of hand sanitizer in tow. While some people go to extreme measures with this, you can still see why people have these in handy now more than ever.

In 2017, a study published in the journal Germs assessed 27 cell phones and found an average of 17,000 bacterial gene copies per phone. Not to mention this year there has been an outburts of pandemic of the COVID-19 aka the coronavirus that is still on the rise today.

But while having hand sanitizer might seem like a smart idea, using it too often could actually do more harm than good for your health. And you can start to see why when you look more into a hand sanitizer.

There Is Triclosan

Hand sanitizer has several ingredients, but the biggest one you need to be familiar with is triclosan.

Also known as TCS, this is the active ingredient in some hand sanitizers. And while this ingredient does a good job at stripping away microbes, a 2018 study found that it was also successful in spurring the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The study found that in 30 days, exposure to even 0.2mg can cause us to build up drug resistance to E. coli.