Amid the coronavirus pandemic, some hand sanitizer manufacturers appear to have swapped in methanol as a dangerous substitute for ethanol, which is typically used as the active ingredient.a nonprofit news organization based in Southern California that focuses on public health, consumer, labor and environmental issues.
It’s a vivid example of the Food and Drug Administration’s lack of authority to crack down on dangerous over-the-counter drugs, a category that includes hand sanitizers. The FDA has responded by issuingabout the dangers of ingesting methanol-containing sanitizers and asking manufacturers to issue recalls.
“I think consumers would be shocked to learn that the FDA doesn’t have authority to pull those products,” said Dr. Michael Carome, director of the Health Research Group at the advocacy organization Public Citizen,for giving the FDA the power to force recalls of prescription and over-the-counter drugs.
The FDA has long had the power to order recalls of defective medical devices. It gained authority to force recalls of contaminated food under the Food Safety Modernization Act signed into law in 2011. A year later, the agency used the power for the first time to shut down a peanut butter factory linked to salmonella poisoning that sickened 41 people.
Despite the perils of its potent alcohol content, hand sanitizer has “always been kind of popular,” said Dr. William Banner, the medical director for the Oklahoma Center for Poison and Drug Information and past president of the American Association of Poison Control Centers. “But the fact that now it's contaminated is what the difference is.”
In most cases, people reported using the product on their skin or inhaling vapors and did not suffer observable injuries, but called poison control centers after finding out the substance was toxic. Though it’s never a good idea to rub a toxic substance on your skin, toxicologists say that the risk of getting methanol poisoning from using hand sanitizer as intended is minimal.
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