Laboratory Based Research

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    Quality assessment of alcohol based hand sanitizers available on market in Blantyre during the Covid-19 pandemic
    (2022-03-08) Gwedeza, Patrick; Luntha, Rhoda
    Sanitizers have been used for a long period of time as disinfectants in different public settings, especially in hospitals. However of the late, there has been an increase in the use of alcoholbased hand sanitizers due to the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 pandemic has also caused an upsurge in the production and importation of alcohol-based hand sanitizers in order to meet the demand whilst raising the likelihood of an influx of substandard products flooding the market. Due to this increase, the risk which can come with these products has also escalated since most of them are under-regulated to check if they are meeting the stipulated regulatory requirements. Therefore, this research project will dwell much on assessing the quality of alcohol based hand sanitizers available on market in Blantyre during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research study is an experimental design involving both qualitative and quantitative analysis because some of the parameters will involve assessing the presence of methanol and determination of other ingredients of hand sanitizers which is qualitative while others will involve assessing the concentration of ethanol which is quantitative in nature. The main objective of this study is to assess the quality of ABHS alcohol-based hand sanitizers commercially available on the market in Blantyre and to be specific the study will assess the concentration of ethanol, the presence of methanol and it will also examine and or determineine other ingredients used by manufacturers during the production of alcohol-based hand sanitizers. The concentration of ethanol and presence of methanol will be assessed by using a gas chromatography machine equipped with flame ionization detector (FID) while the other ingredients present in all the hand sanitizers will be examined physically by looking at the labels of the manufacturer against the ingredients recommended by World Health Organization (WHO) and local regulators especially Pharmacy Medicine Regulatory Authority (PMRA). This study will be carried out using procedures as stipulated in the US Pharmacopeia for quality control method for alcohol determination as well as methods adoapted from other similar and relevant studies. The study will be conducted within a period of four weeks as directed by the pharmacy department. A random sampling technique will be used in selecting the samples and a sample size of 7 hand sanitizers from different manufactures which will be collected in triplicates per manufacturer will be used in this study. 08