To put it simply, life will find a way. Find a way around what kills it if it can mutate and reproduce fast enough. The risk with antibacterial anything is that bacteria have a very fast reproductive cycle. Mutations pop up and any that are even remotely resistant to an antibacterial compound will succeed and reproduce where others fail. It won't be much longer before penicillin is ineffective against modern bacteria. It's all still biology. You kinda have to wait for it to happen with no firm hour of this day or that year to circle in red as THE day a particular antibiotic is no longer effective. You can only look at trends across all hospitals. Private citizens taking over the counter topicals and self medicating don't aggregate data anywhere.
Plain old soap and hot water with scrubbing for at least 20 seconds is your best bet. It's what everyone in the medical fields can agree upon. That and disposable barriers and autoclaves.
Speaking as someone studying in that field, yeah. "Mechanical removal", aka plain old soap and hot water is enough to remove a significant portion of infective agents. Alcohol is the next best thing as by its chemical nature it disrupts cells, so stuff like 95% ethanol is good for cleaning surfaces. Then you have stuff like chlorhexidine, triclosan, polyhexanide and polyaminopropyl biguanide which are pretty crazy, and are useful as well. Chlorhexidine is the stuff you wash your hands with before entering a ward in a hospital, y'know that pink stuff?
Anyway, as to antibacterial soap, there's little point to using it. It has little benefit over normal soaps and washing, with a much larger negative.
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Topic: FDA and antibacterial soaps (Read 1871 times)