#FDA adds 50 more toxic hand sanitizers to recall list

These hand sanitizers won’t just remove bacteria from your hands — they could also poison you.

The Food and Drug Administration has updated its growing list of hand sanitizers that contain methanol, a wood alcohol substance that can be toxic when ingested or absorbed through the skin. And worse yet, sometimes the ingredient may not even be listed on the products.

“FDA is warning consumers and health-care providers that the agency has seen a sharp increase in hand-sanitizer products that are labeled to contain ethanol … but that have tested positive for methanol contamination,” the agency wrote in a post this month, along with a list at the bottom of the hand sanitizers that were either recalled or voluntarily recalled.

The new additions bring the number of dangerous hand sanitizer products from nine to 59.

While methanol poisoning is frequently associated with bootleg liquor, since the coronavirus pandemic, cases of it have been increasingly linked to the ingestion of hand sanitizer. Symptoms of methanol poisoning include nausea, vomiting, headache, blurred vision, permanent blindness and seizures, and could lead to coma, damage to the nervous system and death, the FDA said.

“The agency is aware of adults and children ingesting hand-sanitizer products contaminated with methanol that has led to recent adverse events including blindness, hospitalizations and death,” the FDA noted in its post, before warning consumers that there is no such thing as an “FDA-approved” hand sanitizer, and any product that claims to be is being fraudulently marketed.

Additionally, the FDA warns not to drink hand sanitizer under any circumstances. In April, the agency went so far as to ask manufacturers to add denatured alcohol to their products in the name of making them more bitter-tasting and thus less appealing.

The growing list at the bottom of the memo includes 59 entries from 13 different companies.

When the agency began maintaining the list in June, all nine brands of potentially toxic hand sanitizer on it were made by the same Mexico-based manufacturer, Eskbiochem SA de CV.

Should consumers realize they’ve unknowingly acquired a hand sanitizer from the warning list, the FDA warns not to “flush or pour these products down the drain,” but instead immediately dispose of them in hazardous-waste containers.