Does hand sanitizer destroy your immune system?

I was in a class and a girl sneezed. She asked for hand sanitizer and another girl said that it will destroy your immune system.
Answer:
No it will not destroy your immune system. The girl was sort of right but mostly wrong. Putting rubbing alcohol (or hand sanitizer which is like 99% rubbing alcohol) on your hands won't destroy your immune system. It kills all germs and bacteria on your skin, whether they are "good" bacteria or bad.

Bad bacteria would be the bacteria that causes diseases, good bacteria would be the bacteria that normally lives on your skin, but doesn't harm us because we are so used to having them there. The bad thing about hand sanitizers is that it kills both, but it is speculated that there is a very very small percentage of bacteria that can survive anyway. And now that you've killed off every other bacteria around, you've only left the ones that are resistant. The resistant ones thereby have no one to compete with them for food or places to live, so they propogate quickly. So next time you use the hand sanitizer it won't kill them because the ones that survived last time are immune to it anyway. Course this doesn't happen everytime, or you can imagine how useless it would be already, this is what is speculated will happen slowly, and the reason that people are starting to criticize the use of the hand sanitizers.

Another example is antibiotics and bacteria. As we use antibiotics to kill bacteria, a small portion that survive due to resistantance then have no competition to reproduce because we killed the rest off. The problem is the antibiotic is now useless against them, so we have to make another one, and the process repeats itself. This is a very serious problem in the medical community and is the reason doctors won't prescribe antibiotics for colds or certain other diseases. Since they are caused by virus's which our bodies will slowly take care of themselves, by not using the antibiotics we don't give the bacteria a chance to build resistance against them.

So to go back to your original question. No, hand sanitizer (and for that matter antibiotics) do not destroy your immune system, they act to help it, but in doing so may result in stronger bacteria that are resistant and will therefore give our immune system a harder time.

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The idea that antibacterial hand soaps contribute to resistant "superbugs" (and thereby threaten your immune system) is only a theory... and that does NOT even include alcohol-based hand sanitizers. The alcohol acts quickly to kill germs and then it evaporates, typically within 15 seconds. That's not enough time for germs to get comfy, mutate and develop a resistance.

The best source for good information on the subject is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (www.cdc.gov). They highly recommend the use of alcohol-based hand sanitizers, particularly when there is not convenient access to water.

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