Hey there Dr. O here, in this short video I’m just going to talk about alcohols as chemical control agents. So as you can see here, uh there are two types of alcohol that we use. Ethanol, which would be the same kind of alcohol that people would use to get intoxicated, and Isopropanol, which would be your rubbing alcohol, so two types of alcohol. Um how they function, they can denature proteins so they basically can unravel the proteins and if a protein loses its shape, it loses its function, and they can also disrupt the lipid membranes. They can function as disinfectants or antiseptics, remember the same chemical can be both. Disinfectants are used on surfaces; antiseptics are used on living tissue. So um alcohols can kill quite a few different types of bacteria, they can kill some fungi, they can kill um envelope- eh they can’t kill a virus I guess that’s a lie- but they can kill your um envelope virus so so they are, uh alcohol is pretty effective, so it’s cheap, its effective, uh the downside is, that it’s really volatile- it disappears almost immediately, so ,it’s really only useful uh immediately after you apply it as far as think about um uh using an an alcohol swap prior to giving someone an injection something like that. So as far um as the two different types of alcohol, it appears both of them work best at a 70% concentration, those ,numbers used to be lower but I think we’re seeing some examples of evolution, and that number keeps creeping up, I know like Purell for example used to be 62% alcohol, now you know they’re 70% and you're seeing most of your hand sanitizers- at least your good ones- are climbing up to at least 68%, so there’s uh so so uh you do have to have a certain amount of alcohol but you also have to have a certain amount of water so 100% alcohol wouldn’t work, so the way um it actually, you need water to to disrupt these membranes and denature the proteins so it kind of interesting but 100% is not effective in killing microbes. So if I ask you any questions about this 70% is the sweet spot at this point. Um one last thing about alcohol so comparing these two, ethanol and isopropanol, isopropanol rubbing alcohol is slightly more effective, so both kinds of alcohol are effective but I would I would give the nod to rubbing alcohol or isopropanol. Alright, so those are your two types of alcohols that can be used to chemically control microbial growth. I hope this helps, have a wonderful day, be blessed