Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren Bogelbaum. Here, Washing our hands with soap
Speaker 1: and water is the number one way to kill and
Speaker 1: remove bacteria and viruses. But we're not always just hanging
Speaker 1: around a sink when we need one. That's why a
Speaker 1: little bottle of hand sanitizer comes in very well. Handy,
Speaker 1: so portable, so easy, pretty effective. Of course, in the
Speaker 1: early days of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the United States
Speaker 1: ran into a shortage of hand sanitizer, but many distilleries
Speaker 1: came to the rescue. They had lots of alcohol on
Speaker 1: hand or the means to order it, so they pivoted
Speaker 1: to manufacturing bottles of hand sanitizer to help fill local
Speaker 1: gaps and supply. But is the alcohol in whiskey or
Speaker 1: vodka the same as alcohol in regular store bought hand sanitizer.
Speaker 1: The short answer is not exactly, but it's fine to
Speaker 1: use either as a disinfectant. Here's why. The most common
Speaker 1: hand sanitizers use isopropyl alcohol, sometimes called isopropanol or rubbing alcohol.
Speaker 1: You might have a bottle of it under your bathroom sink,
Speaker 1: and you cannot drink this stuff. It will make you
Speaker 1: sick and it will not make you drunk. The alcohol
Speaker 1: that we humans do drink is ethyl alcohol, sometimes called
Speaker 1: ethanol or grain alcohol. You might have a bottle of
Speaker 1: this in your liquor cabinet or a diluted version in
Speaker 1: your fridge. Since it's the kind of alcohol we talk
Speaker 1: about when we talk about any alcoholic beverage, be it beer, wine, liquor,
Speaker 1: or otherwise. Different human bodies react differently to it, but
Speaker 1: small amounts generally won't make you sick, and it can
Speaker 1: definitely get you drunk. Now, ethyl and isopropyl alcohols have
Speaker 1: sort of similar molecular structures. Both consist as all compounds
Speaker 1: that we call alcohols consist of at least one molecule
Speaker 1: of oxygen plus hydrogen bound to an atom of carbon,
Speaker 1: but beyond that, their chemical variations are enough to make
Speaker 1: one drinkable and one dangerous to ingest. But when it
Speaker 1: comes to hand sanitizer, they work the same way. Research
Speaker 1: into exactly how it works is still ongoing, but they
Speaker 1: both seem to muck around with the structure of proteins
Speaker 1: and lipids and viruses and bacteria. They can dissolve membranes
Speaker 1: and disrupt inner function, which kills those germs. For hand sanitizer,
Speaker 1: the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends a
Speaker 1: solution of between sixty five to alcohol, using either ethyl
Speaker 1: or isopropyl alcohol to get the job done. But if
Speaker 1: a little alcohol is good at killing germs, isn't more better?
Speaker 1: But why stop it's sixty seventy percent alcohol when you
Speaker 1: can go all the way to one well? Because it
Speaker 1: turns out that one alcohol is actually less effective at
Speaker 1: dealing death to those dastardly diseases. When the alcohol begins
Speaker 1: to do its work on bacteria, for instance, the injury
Speaker 1: to the cell's outer wall can cause the bacteria to
Speaker 1: form a protect of shell around itself. That's bad, the
Speaker 1: viruses don't form those protective shells. But higher concentrations of
Speaker 1: alcohol also evaporate very quickly, maybe before it could have
Speaker 1: the chance to penetrate the viruses outer walls. That's also bad.
Speaker 1: Adding ingredients that evaporate more slowly than alcohol means the
Speaker 1: alcohol in the solution lingers longer on your hands. So
Speaker 1: adding stuff like water, hydrogen peroxide, glycerol, and aloe can
Speaker 1: make the solution even more effective. That evaporation factors into
Speaker 1: our comfort too. Ethanol is more dehydrating, and we can
Speaker 1: feel that when we use it on our skin. It
Speaker 1: can make our skin feel tight and dry. A suppropyl
Speaker 1: alcohol evaporates more quickly, but it doesn't dry out our
Speaker 1: hands so badly. That's same super quick evaporation rate is
Speaker 1: why we use rubbing alcohol to clean electronics. By the way,
Speaker 1: I suppropyl alcohol got the more common name rubbing alcohol
Speaker 1: in the nineteen twenties because it was used in liquids
Speaker 1: or lotions that were rubbed into the skin for health
Speaker 1: and healing. This was also the prohibition era, so this
Speaker 1: good alcohol needed to be set apart from the bad
Speaker 1: ethel alcohol that was banned at the time thanks to
Speaker 1: the Eighteenth Amendment. Bravo to those distilleries who have been
Speaker 1: turning it back into a health product in these are
Speaker 1: COVID times. Today's episode was written by Kristen hall Geisler
Speaker 1: and produced by Tyler Klang. For more on this and
Speaker 1: lots of other high proof topics, visit how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. Brain Stuff is a production of I heart Radio.
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