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A warning that pictured and described a purported incident involving an employee whose hands supposedly burst into flame when he lit a cigarette after using a hand sanitizer product first hit our inbox in January 2007. The original PDF document bears a Chevron logo and copyright notice with a 2005 date and specifically identifies Purell brand hand sanitizer: The consumer relations group at Johnson & Johnson, the parent company of Purell, told us only that they were aware of the document, that the incident described was not something they would expect to happen with their product, and that they had no other information about it. The media relations department at Chevron provided us with the following statement: As it turned out, the photographs embedded in the document had nothing to do with hand sanitizer and instead they depicted burns received in an electrical accident: But even though the photographs didn't correspond to the text, could an accident like the one described occur? Hand sanitizers are typically alcohol-based gels containing isopropanol and/or ethyl alcohol, both of which are flammable. The Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) for Purell Instant Hand Sanitizer includes mention that the product contains both those compounds (primarily the latter), but how likely such a gel might be to catch fire and burn depends upon a number of factors, including the concentration of water, moisturizing agents, and other elements present in the product. We conducted a few simple experiments and found that even a small amount of Purell Instant Hand Sanitizer spread on a (non-organic) surface could easily be ignited by the briefest touch of an open flame, although the resulting fire burned relatively cool and was easily extinguished: A 1998 Federal Aviation Administration fire-testing study of an ethanol-based gel hand cleaner found that the product was often difficult to ignite and can be extinguished relatively easily, although none of its trials involved igniting gel while it was in contact with skin.
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