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Review
. 2020 Jun 30:584:119431.
doi: 10.1016/j.ijpharm.2020.119431. Epub 2020 May 16.

Hand sanitisers amid CoViD-19: A critical review of alcohol-based products on the market and formulation approaches to respond to increasing demand

Alberto Berardi  1 , Diego R Perinelli  2 , Hamid A Merchant  3 , Lorina Bisharat  4 , Iman A Basheti  1 , Giulia Bonacucina  2 , Marco Cespi  5 , Giovanni F Palmieri  2
Affiliations
Review

Hand sanitisers amid CoViD-19: A critical review of alcohol-based products on the market and formulation approaches to respond to increasing demand

Alberto Berardi et al. Int J Pharm. .

Abstract

The world is facing a medical crisis amid the CoViD-19 pandemic and the role of adequate hygiene and hand sanitisers is inevitable in controlling the spread of infection in public places and healthcare institutions. There has been a great surge in demand for hand sanitisation products leading to shortages in their supply. A consequent increase of substandard products in the market has raised safety concerns. This article, therefore, presents a critical review of hand sanitation approaches and products available on the market in light of the scientific evidence available to date. This review also provides a range of hand sanitisation product formulations, and manufacturing instructions to allow for extemporaneous preparations at the community and hospital pharmacies during this urgent crisis. In addition, this emergent situation is expected to continue, hence hand sanitisers will be in demand for an extended time, and the availability and purchase of substandard products on the market create an ongoing safety concern. Therefore, this article shall also provide various commercial organisations, interested in stepping forward the production and marketing of hand sanitisers, with a guide on the development of products of standardised ingredients and formulations.

Keywords: CoViD-19; Coronavirus; Disinfection; Gel; Hand-rubs; Hand-sanitisers; Viscosity.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

None
Graphical abstract
Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Trends in the search of the word “hand sanitizer” amid CoViD-19 in the Unites States, extracted from Google Trends on the 20th of April 2020. 1A shows the trend in the google search of the keyword “hand sanitizer” compared to that of “CoViD-19” over the past 12 months. 1B compares the google search for “hand sanitizer” to that of extremely popular medical keywords over the past 12 months. Note that the reported frequencies are not the raw data of the search volume, but are the normalised data against the maximum search interest (i.e. 100%) for that plot.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Average viscosity (n = 3) of commercial hand sanitisers as a function of the shear rate measured at 20 °C.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Schematic diagram summarising possible methods for the manufacturing of hand sanitiser gels.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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