Month: January 2021

Enlarge / Hand sanitizer being applied to a person's hand. (credit: Getty | Leopoldo Smith)

The US Food and Drug Administration on Monday issued a first-of-its-kind alert to try to block the import of toxic hand sanitizers from Mexico, which have been flooding the market amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last June, the regulatory agency began issuing alerts and warnings for consumers about dangerous and counterfeit hand sanitizers, many of which were made in Mexico. Since then, the FDA has issued alerts on 226 products. An FDA survey conducted between April and December found that 84 percent of products tested from Mexico were not in compliance with FDA regulations.

Many of the concerning products are labeled as containing safe alcohols but actually contained methanol, an extremely poisonous form of alcohol associated with incorrectly distilled liquors that can cause blindness and even death. The FDA discovered some other products containing another toxic ingredient, 1-propanol, while others simply contained insufficient amounts of safe alcohols for sanitation. (Safe alcohols for hand sanitizers include ethanol, aka ethyl alcohol, at concentrations above 60 percent or isopropyl alcohol at concentrations above 70 percent).

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Many of us are familiar with the concept of the Friday night news dump, the term given to those occasions when, for example, an embattled politician announces a policy they know will be unpopular. Invariably, it happens late on a Friday afternoon, maximizing the chances that the news gets lost in the churn and forgotten by Monday. As it turns out, there's a similar phenomenon in the auto industry: recall clustering.

For example, in August 2017, Ford issued a recall for leaky fuel tank valves, which was quickly followed by a fuel tank recall from Honda and an oil hose recall issued by Chrysler.

It's not a new thing, either, according to new research published in Manufacturing and Service Operations Management. The researchers looked at 48 years of data, from 1966 to 2013, during which time they identified 3,117 vehicle recalls.