Industrielle Chemie: Open Access

Abstrakt

Assessing Ethanol, Isopropyl Alcohol, and Methanol in Alcohol-Based Hand Sanitizer: Ensuring Quality and Safety

Mustafa Soylak

The unprecedented global pandemic of Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) has sparked serious public health crises. One of the World Health Organization's recommendations for reducing the transmission of COVID-19 is to practice good hand hygiene, which includes either washing one's hands with soap and water or disinfecting them with an alcohol-based hand sanitizer (ABHS). Unfortunately, competing ABHSs flourished with unknown efficacy, safety, and quality, posing a further threat to consumers. The objective of this study is to develop an analytical technique based on gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC–MS) for simultaneously identifying and quantifying ethanol or isopropyl alcohol as the active ingredient in ABHS and methanol as an impurity. Chosen Particle Checking was chosen as the information obtaining procedure for quantitation, and the GC-MS was utilized in Electron Ionization mode. The analytical method was tested for specificity, linearity, range, accuracy, and precision, including the detection and quantification limits, for liquid and gel ABHSs. To determine the specificity of each target analyte, the best chromatographic separation with distinct quantifier and qualifier ions was used. The linearity was determined using a coefficient of determination (r2) greater than 0.9994 over the specified range. Individually, the precision and exactness were within 98.99 and 101.09% of the overall standard deviation, respectively, and below 3.04%. 14 of the 69 ABHS samples used to test the method did not contain enough of the active ingredient. Four samples had an alarmingly high percentage of methanol in their active alcohol percentage, ranging from 5.3 to 19.4 percent. Customers' short- and long-term health may suffer as a result, and their lives may be in jeopardy. The established method would be beneficial in protecting the public from potential harm resulting from unsafe or substandard ABHS products because of the presence of dangerous impurities like methanol.