As someone who knows almost nothing about infectious disease, I was wondering if the excessive use of disinfectants and hand sanitizers might be creating resistant bacteria and viruses that are immune to disinfecting procedures? Are we possibly creating worse bugs by our response to this one?

It is the 0.01% that are not killed, according to the bottles, that might be of concern.

I'm far from an expert myself but the answer is yes. We've known for years now that some of our antibiotics have become nearly useless against certain bugs as they've evolved to resisit them.
I've also read some theories that the incidence of nut allergies has increased so much because a generation has grown up with anti-microbial everything and ergo haven't developed as strong an immune system as older generations.

Thanks for the answer. When I Googled the question the GOJO web site gave an answer similar to yours. I also found an abstract of a paper that appeared to discusses resistant bacteria in hospitals caused by disinfecting.

It would be good to hear from some Aggie experts. For now I believe that it is best to disinfect often to combat this particular virus. I just hope that we are not creating untreatable infections by over use.

AstroAg17 said:

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Selection acts on genetic variation. If there is no variation in fitness between individuals in a population then there will be no evolved resistance. Coronavirus has low variability and therefore probably a lower potential to become resistant to things, but more generally it's very hard to evolve resistance to 70% alcohol. It's just too general of a disinfectant and it works by denaturing proteins not by interaction with a specific piece of the virus. It's much easier for the virus to change a piece of itself than to stop being made of proteins. Since it works with most proteins, viruses are not very good at evolving resistance to alcohol.

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This is correct. Antibiotic resistance is an issue due to evolving bacteria but resistance to toxic cleaning solutions that never have to enter the body (and therefore can be much more noxious) is almost impossible for the reasons listed above.

Thanks for the confirmation. Dropping a box off at FedEx were every employee was carrying a spray bottle made me wonder if we might be overdoing the disinfecting.
I guess it is like gun shots. Even if the game survives being shot, it will never become immune to the effects of a bullet.

If Aids was a communicable as Ebola. That would be a super-virus.

Most disinfectants/hand sanitizers just contain alcohol, and we are not worried about bacteria acquiring any type of resistance (nor will they) to those so use them as often as you like.

Pro tip: if you can't find hand sanitizer at your local store, check the ingredients on sun screens. You want to find the ones that have > 70% ethanol/alcohol in them