 Hey everybody, Dr. O here. This short video I'm just going to talk about alcohols as chemical control agents. So as you can see here, there are two types of alcohol that we use, ethanol, which would be the same kind of alcohol that people would use to get intoxicated, and isopropanol, which would be your rubbing alcohol. So two types of alcohol. How they function, they can denate your proteins, so they basically can unravel the proteins and if a protein loses its shape, it loses its function and they also can disrupt the lipid membranes. They can function as disinfectants or antiseptics, remember the same chemical can be both. Disinfectants are used on surfaces, antiseptics are used on living tissue. So alcohols can kill quite a few different types of bacteria, they can kill some fungi, they can kill envelope, it can't kill a virus, I guess it's not alive, but they can kill your envelope viruses. So alcohol is pretty effective, so it's cheap and it's effective. The downside is that it's really volatile, it disappears almost immediately, so it's really only useful immediately after you apply it, as far as think about using an alcohol swab prior to giving someone an injection, something like that. So as far as the two different types of alcohol, it appears that both of them work best at about a 70% concentration. Those numbers used to be lower, but I think we're seeing some examples of evolution, that number keeps creeping up. I know Purell, for example, used to be 62% alcohol, now they're 70%, and you're seeing most of your hand sanitizers, at least your good ones, are climbing up to at least 68%. So you do have to have a certain amount of alcohol, but you also have to have a certain amount of water, so 100% alcohol wouldn't work. So the way, actually you need water to disrupt these membranes in the nature of these proteins, so it's just kind of interesting, but 100% alcohol is not effective at killing microbes. So if I ask you any questions about this, 70% is the sweet spot at this point. One last thing about alcohol, so comparing these two, ethanol and isopropanol, isopropanol, rubbing alcohol is slightly more effective. So both kinds of alcohol are effective, but I would give the nod to rubbing alcohol or isopropanol. All right, so those are your two types of alcohols that can be used to chemically control microbial growth. I hope this helps. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.