Are Hand Sanitizers Bad For Your Microbiome?

Bacteria have been our enemies for a long time. Our fight with bacteria before the discovery of antibiotics often resulted in death when we heard about them. For this reason, many of us think that hand sanitizers are very powerful bactericidal destroyer and we can use them freely without fear of the health problems they may cause. Is this really true? In the last decade, microbes have started to take a positive role in our lives again. In addition to the transmission of bad microbes to us, we have noticed that the good bacteria in our bodies also digest nutrients and even remove the infection from where it first occurred. Unfortunately, antibacterials do not make any difference for good and bad bacteria. This leaves users at a crossroads: Should we use hand disinfectants to prevent disease or should we own our  germ hands for our health?

There is no definitive answer to what we know about microbiome right now. Therefore, the situation in question becomes an issue that needs to be questioned.

“In one view, hand disinfectants can generally affect our body’s microbiome in a number of ways, and some of them can have bad results,” says Jonathan Eisen, a microbiologist at Davis University in California. Muhtemelen tehlikeli mikropları öldürürken, deride insanlığa fayda sağlayan bakterileri de değiştiriyoruz. While we can’t see any of them, millions of bacteria live in our hands, on our skin and in our gut. Scientists have recently begun to realize that each person has a personal balance of bacteria, among other bacteria, and that these bacteria keep the body under control. When we use hand disinfectants, we try to kill almost all of the good and bad microbes that we have.

In addition to potentially killing beneficial bacteria, Eisen also says that hand disinfectants also cause antibiotic resistance. “Although they usually do not contain standard antibiotics, when microbes start to be resistant to some disinfectants, this makes it easier to develop resistance to antibiotics that are important to microbes.” says. Antibiotic resistance is already a serious threat and is getting worse.

So should we disinfect or not?

“I advise people to use hand sanitizers cautiously and only when they really need it,” Eisen says. Consider what it touching just before your hands. It is not a bad idea to use a disinfectant if you spend your time only in the hospital, for example, in a doctor’s office, or in the subway, if someone coughs and sneezes with you. But it is not necessary to disinfect yourself on a normal day when you do not touch other people very much. It is not particularly necessary if you have the opportunity to wash regularly with soap. A study with normal soap in 2009 found that when properly rubbed, soap is good at potentially killing bacteria and viruses that cause infection. A study with normal soap in 2009 had been found that soap was good at killing infection-causing bacteria and viruses when properly rubbed. Many studies still need to be done to better understand the skin microbiome, especially for those who live in our hands. If we can understand how some microbes keep us healthy, we can also know how often and in what situations it would be more appropriate to use the hand sanitizer. For now, use the disinfectants as sparingly as possible, following Eisen’s advice. Imagine this is your last chance to defend the world from dirt.