Reading about the recent hand sanitizer recalls reminded me inadvertently of the whole Drinking Hand Sanitizer In Lieu of Alcohol situation, which I actually think is really interesting. For context, ethanol is a primary ingredient in hand sanitizer, so when people suffering from an alcohol addiction (or normal teenagers, even) don't have access to alcohol, they sometimes will resort to drinking it. Beyond the obvious issue of the very high alcohol content of hand sanitizers (usually 60% or higher), there's the issue of the alcohol in them being denatured by methanol, which can easily cause a myriad of health problems including Going Blind or just Dying.

The reason why I find this so interesting is because of how it correlates to COVID. Alcohol consumption has increased significantly since the pandemic (wow... saying that made me realize how little it even comes up anymore), and so has the sale and production of hand sanitizer. The necessitation of hand sanitizers during COVID also meant that productions standards and regulations were shirked in order to capitalize on the boom of the market, often, ironically, at the expense of consumer safety.

Pairing a large rise in binge drinking and alcoholism with COVID (and post-COVID) shipping/trade restrictions and a rise in hand sanitizers that fail to meet quality and safety regulae obviously poses a significant problem, since anybody lacking access to alcohol who may be addicted could unknowningly drink contaminated hand sanitizer and suffer horrible consequences for the sake of a cheap buck. Thankfully, bans and regulations passed by the FDA around late 2020 curbed it significantly, but unfortunately, it seems the issue isn't quite resolved yet.

I don't necessarily have any proposal or resolution to fix it, but I did find a device proposal by some chemists(?) that could also help significantly to curb the issue: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7840468/. I have no idea if anything came of it, but I thought it was neat.