In a book I read called Carriers, one of the characters is a doctor who, faced with a colleague’s exposure to an unknown rain forest spawned virus, grabs a bottle of hard alcohol (rum, scotch, or vodka—I only remember that it was a type meant for consumption) and pours it on the colleague’s wound that he fears has allowed the virus entrance. Then the author wrote something like, “It was a merely a reflexive action—as a doctor, he knew alcohol doesn’t kill viruses.”
Now the book was a novel, but most of the medical-related content seemed fairly well grounded in reality. I can’t imagine someone writing a book like *Carriers * without conducting a lot of research, even if it is for a fictional plot.
So did the author mean that alcohol doesn’t kill viruses, or did he simply mean that hard alcohol meant for consumption does not kill viruses?
I asked some science teachers this question and they said that because viruses have only RNA and no DNA, there’s some debate over whether or not they’re alive at all, despite the fact that they meet some of the criteria for life (ability to reproduce and propagate, for instance).
So does alcohol kill viruses? If so, how strong must it be? 70%? 99%? And how does it kill the viruses if it does indeed kill them? By dehydrating them?