Imagine you want to disable a car. You could open the hood and unplug the battery. Or you could fire a missile at it.
Antibiotics are like unplugging the battery. It only works if you can get under the hood and it wouldn’t work at all on electric cars. It’s selective.
Alcohol is like a missile. It destroys everything. You can’t evolve resistance to missiles. You just have to hope you don’t get hit.
But the hand sanitizers that don’t destroy everything are alcohol.
Really the point here is that there is a certain amount of randomness and an absolute fuck ton of pathogens anywhere you might try and clean.
If you fire a billion cars into the sun at slightly random trajectories then one might just skim the outside of the sun as it melts and have enough energy to fly back out without getting utterly incinerated. Thus we could not say that the sun destroys all cars, but also if you fire your car into the sun you’d be a fool to expect to drive to work the next day.
It is worth noting that 0.01% of bacteria do not survive because the alcohol is ineffective; but because they were fortunate enough to avoid contact. Under nails, between folds in skin, under microscopic imperfections within the creases and scars on your hands, etc. Full coverage to the human eye does not equate to absolute coverage on a microscopic level.
This, the polarity of the cell which permits selective permeability & a hydrophilic environment means alcohol’s will be functional as antiseptics due to the hydroxyl (OH) group. However, alcohol needs to be approximately 70% for max efficiency as OH2 facilities it’s ability to denature the cell.
