basically, lots of people in China are sick again and alcohol won’t kill this virus? I hopped onto here expecting a discussion but I don’t seem to see anything else talking about it?? Fake news? Overreaction?
Massive grain of salt out the gate with this…that is NTD (New Tang Dynasty) TV, snug in bed with the Falun Gong.
Epoch Times, NTD TV, Shen Yun…all the same people. Regardless of persecution happening or not now and in the past, this group has been very controversial over the years, even getting in trouble with the law in the US (recently).
Still waiting on the 3 Gorges Dam to break as they assured everyone a while back.
Shut up, pleeeaase. Just ignore it and it’ll go away.
I’m not doing it again unless it’s Ebola or something.
“Immune to alcohol” is probably science-illiterate media hyperbole, but it likely means something like conventional alcohol-based hand sanitizers etc. not being very effective, which seems to be a thing:
Ethanol is used worldwide in healthcare facilities for hand rubbing. It has been reported to have a stronger and broader virucidal activity compared with propanols. The aim of this review was to describe the spectrum of virucidal activity of ethanol in solution or as commercially available products. A systematic search was conducted. Studies were selected when they contained original data on reduction of viral infectivity from suspension tests (49 studies) and contaminated hands (17 studies). Ethanol at 80% was highly effective against all 21 tested, enveloped viruses within 30 s. Murine norovirus and adenovirus type 5 are usually inactivated by ethanol between 70% and 90% in 30 s whereas poliovirus type 1 was often found to be too resistant except for ethanol at 95% (all test viruses of EN 14476). Ethanol at 80% is unlikely to be sufficiently effective against poliovirus, calicivirus (FCV), polyomavirus, hepatitis A virus (HAV) and foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV). The spectrum of virucidal activity of ethanol at 95%, however, covers the majority of clinically relevant viruses. Additional acids can substantially improve the virucidal activity of ethanol at lower concentrations against, e.g. poliovirus, FCV, polyomavirus and FMDV although selected viruses such as HAV may still be too resistant. The selection of a suitable virucidal hand rub should be based on the viruses most prevalent in a unit and on the user acceptability of the product under frequent-use conditions.
Yeah, I remember all those silly videos about the dam being on the verge of imminent collapse.
I haven’t heard about this one at all, and post-COVID I’m still paying a probably unhealthy amount of attention to various epidemiology and health RSS feeds and podcasts.
They’re too busy talking about bird flu and whatever new disease is appearing in … Congo?
So I’d guess whatever’s currently happening in China isn’t something to worry about. Much.
I think it’s just a wild rumor. I know what you’re talking about, but I guess that’s not what was meant, at least from a surface reading of the headline; a literal translation is “alcohol is ineffective toward it”.
I don’t see a discrepancy between what you wrote and what I wrote? If alcohol in hand sanitizers etc. “isn’t very effective”, another way to phrase that is that “alcohol is ineffective” (in this context). It’s a spectrum, not a binary thing.
The abstract I posted above already makes that pretty clear, no?
I don’t think this is anything to do with COVID? The Google-translated article seemed to mention respiratory viruses and norovirus, no? (I just skimmed it in maybe 20 seconds, didn’t read it properly.)
Viruses can be “resistant” to alcohol though, and alcohol is “ineffective” for some viruses — both of those things are already known.
I can only say that I see a difference. One issue is the effectiveness of alcohol, full stop, while the effectiveness of hand sanitizers containing some proportion of alcohol is a separate issue.
Next time we won’t see it coming. There will be far more active cover up and denial. When it becomes undeniable, people won’t believe it is happening. Taking action will take much longer. And scapegoating, there will be lots of it.
It’s not though. I could probably have been clearer in my original post, admittedly, but you’ll note that I did write “conventional alcohol-based hand sanitizers etc.”.
I wasn’t referring exclusively to hand sanitizers here, but alcohol as it’s been used in the real world for the duration of the pandemic and alcohol as it’s normally used in medical facilities. This includes spray bottles of 95% ethanol/5% water, which is largely what I had in mind with “conventional alcohol-based hand sanitizers etc.” — because those spray bottles and dispensers with 95% ethanol, rather than little bottles of gel-based hand sanitizer as seen before the pandemic, were the norm in Taiwan for people sanitizing hands and everything else in this context since sometime around 2020 (and still now).
Pure ethanol is basically never used here because it forms an azeotrope with water (so it’s more expensive to make), and I believe the small amount of water improves the efficacy too.
Anyway, all of this is centered around aqueous mixtures of ethanol, where as a rule a higher ethanol content means greater efficacy against most viruses, but even at the maximum ethanol content (95–100%) some viruses aren’t sufficiently destroyed, which can be reasonably expressed in non-academic contexts with descriptions such as “alcohol isn’t effective against this virus” and “the virus is resistant to alcohol”. That’s the point I was trying to make.
That was my point. I hadn’t thought much about alcohol and viruses until COVID and it was only then that I cared to know that there’s no way for them to become resistant to alcohol.
I think the consensus opinion would be that it’s very improbable (i.e., close to impossible) for enveloped viruses to evolve “immunity” or “high levels of resistance” to alcohol because the mechanism by which alcohol disrupts the lipid envelopes is far too general — it would be too big of an evolutionary leap. Like becoming resistant to bleach or something, which just messes with too many biomolecules to overcome.
Non-enveloped viruses are apparently more resistant to alcohol though, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you could slightly improve resistance (for both enveloped and non-enveloped viruses) through some kind of directed evolution experiments, i.e., deliberately selecting for alcohol resistance.