Ever since the emergence of coronavirus, there has been emphasis on hand hygiene. Wash your hands with soap for 20 seconds, or if soap is not available, use a hand sanitiser.
Use of hand sanitisers have grown exponentially. At the same time, several viral posts calling sanitisers dangerous have been doing the rounds.
A picture with swollen, puss filled hands is doing the rounds with the claim that this is caused by overuse of hand sanitisers.
To fact-check this claim, we reached to to Dr Dr DM Mahajan, senior consultant with the dermatology department at Apollo Hospitals, Delhi.
According to Dr Mahajan, in a normal sanitiser, such is reaction is unlikely, unless it contains something that causes burning, or if it has been used alongside a caustic. India’s Health Ministry or any other health agency has not spoken about hand sanitisers leading to burning. The messaging has been that if you don’t have soap and water, using sanitisers is advisable.
Another message related to sanitisers has gone viral. It claims that while opening a liquid sanitiser, a splash of the sanitiser on the eyes caused cornea damage to a girl’s eye. It further says that if instead of liquid sanitiser, a gel-based sanitiser was used, it would not have caused so much damage.
We reached out to Dr Anita Sethi, an eye specialist at Gurugram’s Fortis Hospital, to cross-check this claim.
Dr Sribhargav Nitesh, director of Netra Eye, Bengaluru, had this to say.
“Cornea damage to the eye will depend not on whether the sanitiser is liquid or gel-based, but on how much sanitiser entered the eye and for how long.”
If the sanitiser does enter your eyes, follow these steps:
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)