Should you rub alcohol on your hands?

Where I work, everywhere you look you will find bowls brimming with packets of hand sanitizer towelettes, plastic containers of hand sanitizing wipes, bottles of hand sanitizing gel and hand sanitizer dispensers hanging on the walls.

I was curious about this flu-driven phenomenon and so did a little research. I came up with these fun facts about hand sanitizers, which are said to help stop the spread of disease by killing germs:

• Even the Web site for Purell, the brand leader, says soap and water is preferred to hand sanitizers and they should only be used when hand washing isn't possible.
• Hand sanitizers are typically made out of ethyl alcohol, and there have been reports of people drinking them to get drunk, including a prison inmate and a hospital patient. An 8-year-old girl at a play center reportedly became tipsy after licking globs of it.
• Hand sanitizers don't clean dirt from your hands, a disadvantage versus plain old soap and water, especially in schools, where they are frequently used as a substitute.
• The CDC says (PDF) hand sanitizers must be at least 60 percent alcohol to be effective, but some sold have had less than that.
• Four brands of hand sanitizer are on the Food and Drug Administration's "Fraudulent 2009 H1N1 Influenza Products List"
• Because it's alcohol, it's flammable, though an urban legend that a man's caught fire while lighting a cigarette have been debunked. The American Journal of Infection Control, however, reported in 2002 that a Louisville health care worker's hands caught fire when she touched a metal door and generated a spark.
• Politicians such as Dick Cheney use hand sanitizer after shaking hands with their constituents, and George W. Bush once recommended it to Barack Obama because it “keeps you from getting colds.”
• Many of the studies that tout the value of hand sanitizers over soap and water are funded by hand sanitizer makers. That includes at least four of the five discussed in a 2004 review of research on hand sanitizers in schools. The review labeled all five studies as being of "low quality and methodologically weak."
• The Environmental Working Group labels Purell a "high hazard" because of its ingredients (although the EWG's site does little to make it easy to distinguish good scientific evidence of this, if any, from bad).
• In June the FDA brought an action against a Utah hand sanitizer maker because it said the company's product contained "high levels of disease-causing bacteria."
• The instructions on the Purell bottles where I work say that for it to be effective you should use enough to "thoroughly cover your hands." I have yet to see anyone at work do that. They just use a dollop.

I'll be sticking to soap and water.