Abstract
BACKGROUND: The Covid-19 pandemic has created a high demand for hand sanitizer to prevent the spread of pathogens. This resulted in a hand sanitizer shortage on the market and promoted more manufactures to produce and sell hand sanitizers. Meanwhile, Health Canada has recalled many hand sanitizers due to potential health risks for various reasons such as products that contain unauthorized ingredients. However, the general public in Canada might not notice hand sanitizer recalls and/or underestimate the risk of using recalled hand sanitizers. This research study was conducted to determine the general public awareness regarding hand sanitizer recalls. METHODS: An online self-administered survey was conducted on SurveyMonkey to collect responses from participants recruited through Reddit and email invitations. NCSS software was used to perform statistical analyses of Chi-square tests on the collected data. RESULTS: 402 respondents completed most of the survey questions. 47.1% of the respondents had not heard of hand sanitizer recalls in Canada before taking this survey. 70.1% of the respondents were located in British Columbia. Respondents who were more likely to be aware of hand sanitizer recalls were female (p = 0.0075), people aged 25 or older (p= 0.0001), and people who have completed a higher level of education (p=0.0018). Respondents who were not aware of hand sanitizer recalls tend not to notice that there were risk statements on the labels of hand sanitizers (p=0.0003). 54.8% of the respondents strongly or somewhat agreed that it was difficult to check if their hand sanitizers are on the recall list. 62.2% of the respondents strongly agreed that they were concerned about the potential risks associated with using recalled hand sanitizers. Out of five methods to dispose recalled hand sanitizers, 46.6% respondents preferred to throw the whole bottle away into the garbage can. CONCLUSIONS: The results from this research study revealed that a large proportion of participants are unaware of hand sanitizers recalls and did not know how to properly discard recalled hand sanitizers. Therefore, new policies and campaigns should be developed to raise the awareness of hand sanitizer recalls among the general public that emphasize potential health hazards and proper ways to discard recalled hand sanitizers.