Necessity is the mother of invention.

That mother, like all of them, wants you to wash your hands.

Since COVID-19 became the new normal in the southwest, recipes for homemade hand sanitizers have begun to spring up virtually everywhere. From Facebook D.I.Y recipes to entire distilleries shifting their production focus seemingly overnight to satisfy the public's and the healthcare system's sudden insatiable desire for disinfected hands.

Now Health Canada is warning Canadians that it's possible that those homemade recipes may not only be ineffectual, but actively dangerous.

At issue are two potential problems with homemade sanitizers.

The first is simply that the alcohol content of these kitchen-sink formulas may be simply too low to kill the coronavirus in the first place. There is no magic number in that regard, but for the record, effective Health Canada approved hand sanitizers will have an alcohol concentration of over 60%. Many DIY recipes fall well short of that.

The second is that homemade sanitizers may introduce other health concerns, such as skin irritation and increased sensitivity to allergies, not to mention being potentially unsafe to create in a home environment.

Regardless of the recipe, Health Canada says that it does not recommend making your own hand sanitizer. Even the recipe recommended by the World Health Organization is intended, they say, to be manufactured by licensed producers in a controlled environment in order to ensure the final product's efficacy.

Their recommendation instead is to only use sanitizers that have been authorized for sale in Canada, which would be denoted on its label by the inclusion of either a Natural Product Number (NPN) or a Drug Identification Number (DIN).

With the now unprecedented demand for products like hand sanitizer, Health Canada has put an Expedited Access Process in place for companies to seek Health Canada authorization to manufacture and sell alcohol-based sanitizer. Meaning that those aforementioned distilleries and breweries that have shifted their focus to sanitizer production in order to help with the increasing demand will also display one of those numbers if their product has been authorized by Health Canada.

As an interim measure, Health Canada is also relaxing certain rules and allowing access to products that, while safe and effective, do not meet other regulatory rules. As an example, products that are not labelled in both official languages but are otherwise perfectly safe and effective will be allowed on a temporary basis.

A list of authorized hand sanitizers is updated daily, Monday through Friday and is available here.