Fifty-four years ago in 1966, Lupe Hernandez — a nursing student from Bakersfield, California — found out one day that alcohol could be delivered in a gel, leading to the discovery of hand sanitizer.

Alcohol has been well-known as a germ killer and an antiseptic liquid in the medical community for centuries. The newly found sanitizer became popular among doctors and nurses.

But in the late 1980s the hand sanitizer was commercialized by companies like Purell and Gojo.

Hernandez might have never imagined that one day his invention would become a hot commodity in the world. Prices have skyrocketed during the last two months, with most people and companies rushing to buy hand sanitizers in large quantities to stockpile them.

“Frankly speaking, I never used hand sanitizer in my whole life. I thought only doctors and nurses use it. Now, everybody wants to use it. I tried to buy some at three drug stores; I did not get a single bottle,” Diana Natalie, a housewife who lives in Tanjung Duren, West Jakarta, told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.

With price gouging, hand sanitizer has become a rare commodity both online and at drug stores, as well as in supermarkets.

Why are people all of a sudden crazy about hand sanitizer, facial masks and other sanitary products?

It is because of an outbreak of a respiratory disease caused by a new coronavirus around the globe. There has been confusion about the name of the coronavirus and the disease it causes.

According to the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from the United States, the official name of the coronavirus is SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes is called COVID-19. SARS, incidentally, stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.

SARS-CoV-2 has many entry points into the bodies of human beings including hands, mouth and nose.

SARS-CoV-2 first appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan in Hubei province in December 2019 and has now spread to 124 countries out of the 195 in the world. Based on data from worldometers.info, as of March 13 (as of 1,800 hours), the virus had infected 137,674 people, causing 5,080 deaths, including four people in Indonesia.

On Wednesday, WHO declared the outbreak a global pandemic.

“We are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming levels of inaction. We have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterised as a pandemic,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists in Geneva on Wednesday. 

“This is the first pandemic caused by a coronavirus.”

But the good news is that, according to the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, more than 66,000 people (70,437 people according to latest data) have been cured of COVID-19.

As is natural in a pandemic, people behave abnormally and overcautiously.

People want to wear masks and wash hands with sanitizer, but the question is whether these measures would actually protect people from SARS-CoV-2.

It is very difficult to say yes. The facts on the ground clearly show that the virus can still infect people even if they use hand sanitizer frequently. Several doctors and nurses in China and Japan, who always used masks and hand sanitizer, as well as took all other precautions, got infected and some died.

Yet, there are still some benefits from using hand sanitizer.

Washing hands with soap and water can reduce the amounts of germs like cryptosporidium, norovirus and clostridium difficile and chemicals, says the CDC. So there is no big need for hand sanitizers.

But if we do not have access to soap and water in circumstances like when traveling or in an office, a hand sanitizer is the best option. There are certain things, according to the CDC, we must know about hand sanitizer, like what kind of sanitizer we have to use, how much we have to use every time and how to use it effectively. Otherwise, hand sanitizer is useless.

Make sure when you buy a hand sanitizer, it must contain a minimum of 60 percent alcohol. The higher the percentage of alcohol (above 60 percent), the better the results.

“Using a hand sanitizer with at least 60 percent alcohol can help you avoid getting sick and spreading germs to others,” said the CDC on its website.

Alcohol is the key in handwashing.

“We can use alcohol, whatever form, to wash our hands because alcohol kills a number of microbes and germs effectively, but not all. It will depend upon the percentage of alcohol in the liquid or gel and how you use it,” says Sanjeevini Pertiwi, who studied biomedicine at the Indonesia International Institute for Life Sciences in Jakarta.

The CDC said that hand sanitizer might not eliminate all types of germs all the time.

People, the CDC said, must not use a large quantity of sanitizer just for two hands. Do not wipe it off before it dries.

Another thing we must make sure of is that our hands are not visibly dirty or greasy. Under these two situations, hand sanitizer may not work effectively and it is better if we wash our hands with soap and water.

Hand sanitizers cannot remove chemicals like pesticides and heavy metals from our hands.

Apply the sanitizer to the palm of one head and rub it all over the surfaces of your hands until they are dry. Do not forget to apply sanitizer to your both wrists.

Washing your hands with soap and water frequently is good for health. If they are not accessible any moment, use hand sanitizers with 60 to 90 percent alcohol content in a proper way to wash your hands.

Photos JP/Arief Suhardiman

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