Hand sanitisers could trigger drug resistance crisis- study
The world knows a hand sanitiser as one of the crucial components of preventing the coronavirus. But as a certain researcher suggests, the prolonged use of the sanitiser could breed another health crisis in the future.
Samantha McCarlie, a microbiologist from the University of Free State in South Africa, says the world may battle antibiotic resistance in the coming years as a result of the prolonged use of the sanitisers.
Quoted by the British press, McCarlie says the problem could be even more pronounced than the global pandemics that have so far claimed millions of lives.
She said: “Antibiotic resistance is becoming one of the biggest life-threatening challenges of our time, even overshadowing the current pandemic, as multidrug-resistant infections are becoming increasingly difficult to treat.
“Bacterial infections that are present in hospitals and agriculture are becoming unresponsive to many of the antibiotics currently in use, marking the start of a post-antibiotic era.
“Currently, the best viable protection we have against bacteria is biosecurity and disinfectants.
According to McCarlie, cheap disinfectants that circulate in the market and abuse of antibiotic drugs have been to blame for the skyrocketing resistance. She however suggests that the in the case of COVID-19, people should only use verified sanitisers with the right strength.
“It is therefore very important that reliable high-quality disinfectants are used as hand sanitisers during this COVID-19 crisis, otherwise we will be replacing one crisis with a potentially even bigger crisis.”
This is not a problem that only faces humans but also plants and animals where humans get food. In the study titled ‘Molecular basis of bacterial disinfectant resistance’, published by Pubmed.gov, Samantha McCarlie, Charlotte Boucher and Robert Bragg opine in the abstract that antibiotic resistance poses even a huge threat to food security.
‘‘Disinfectant resistance has the potential to change our way of life from compromising food security to threatening our medical health systems,’’ they state.