Some disinfecting products don’t contain enough active ingredients to kill the coronavirus, regulators say.
For months, the Food and Drug Administration has been urging U. S. consumers to avoid a growing list of hand sanitizers that. Now the agency is warning of another problem: Some brands may not be strong enough to kill the coronavirus. To work, sanitizers must have a sufficient amount of at least one of two kinds of alcohol. They have to have be at least 60% ethanol or 70% isopropanol, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those levels are also safe on human skin. According to the FDA, the following sanitizer products are “sub-potent,” meaning they lack enough of the active ingredients that protect people from infection: Worse, some of those sanitizers also contain methanol, which is used to make fuel and is dangerous when absorbed through the skin, inhaled or ingested. The lack of potency is one of the reasons the FDA’s list of sanitizers that people should avoid expanded this week to about 100 brands and nearly 150 varieties.
