How hand sanitizers might end up making you sick
The hidden health cost of using hand sanitiser
- Widespread use of disinfectants, particularly those containing quaternary ammonium compounds (QACs), may inadvertently contribute to antimicrobial resistance.
- QACs, common in household and clinical products such as hand sanitiser, cause microbes to evolve resistance, which can also boost their resistance to antibiotics through co-resistance and cross-resistance mechanisms.
- This phenomenon exacerbates the global health crisis of antimicrobial resistance, which caused 1.27 million deaths in 2019 and is critically high and rising, according to the WHO.
- The overuse of disinfectants in everyday life, beyond essential clinical settings, creates selective pressures that favour the development and spread of resistant microbes.
- Responsible cleaning practices should consider the long-term ecological consequences of disinfectant use, moving beyond immediate microbe elimination to manage the broader microbial world.