Hi, Everyone and special thanks to the team of this page. Really appreciate your work indeed. I was keen interested know about the frequent use of various hand sanitizers on our liver. I have liver damages due to hep b virus and due to fear of COVID I constantly use hand sanitizers and soup for hand washing. Am I intentionally affecting my liver in order to be save from COVID?
Need our colleagues view and experience on this.
Regards
Hi @Abdul,
Welcome to the community! I think this is a great question that many people might be wondering about. Probably the most dangerous for the liver is ethanol being absorbed or inhaled from the handwash (the majority of a hand sanitizer is alcohol).
I found a study looking at this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735675706001318?via%3Dihub. It was quite small (only 5 people) but they got them to apply “5 mL of the product (62% denatured ethyl alcohol manufactured by Kimberley-Clark, Roswell, GA) to both hands and rubbed until dry. This activity was repeated 50 times over 4 hours.” This is probably a lot more than what you are doing in your day to day (even with COVID). Long story short, they could not detect any increase in ethanol levels in the blood after this study.
Others have looked at isopropanol hand sanitizers (getting participants to use it every 10 minutes!), finding a very small increase in the blood. https://www.journalofhospitalinfection.com/article/S0195-6701(04)00013-1/fulltext
These suggest that the sanitisers aren’t doing anything to your liver health. We can also rest easy a bit with data from health care workers, who use huge amounts of hand cleaning products but do not see any real increase in liver disease.
Hope this helps,
Thomas
@ThomasTu a bundle of thanks for valuable information. This information give some relief indeed.
Hi all,
I am an HBV virologist. Thomas’ assessment makes a lot of sense to me. The skin is a really good barrier to many chemicals, including most alcohols (such as Ethanol and Isopropyl alcohol which are in most hand sanitizers). I would not worry about that–it seems to me that reducing the risk of other infectious agents (bacteria, fungi, some viruses) that can be transmitted through contact would greatly outweigh the negligible risk from absorbing hand sanitizer components. (And I’m a compulsive hand-sanitzer user!).
John
Hello,
Thank you for this post. I’m new here, so I’m not yet authorised to create a new topic. Hence, I’ll post my question here.
I would like to ask whether skincare products that contain some alcohol in various forms and other ingredients (such as alcohol denat., propylene glycol, glyceryl stearate citrate, phenoxyethanol, methylpropanediol, retinol, retinoids — these are only examples) can be used on daily skincare routine?
And to introduce myself. I’m T. I live in the middle of Europe. I’m 30. 
Dear @arb,
Welcome to the forum!
With regards to absorbing any alcohol from skin care products, the risk is negligible and it wouldn’t be something I would worry about. I guess a potential issue is possibly allergic reactions, but that isn’t specifically associated with Hep B. You’ll just have to test on a small patch of skin first to see if you react to it.
Cheers,
Thomas