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Antiviral Activities of Alcohols against HSV-1
Hilmar Hilmarsson, Halldor Thormar

Previous studies have shown that various fatty acids have microbicidal activities against a number of pathogens. Exactly how the fatty acids kill microbes is unknown, but it has been shown that they cause disintegration of enveloped viruses like vesicular somatitis virus. Alcohols may act in a similiar way, i.e. penetrate the envelope of the virus by hydrophobic effect, making it permeable to small molecules and thus killing the virus. The nature of this effect may be elucidated by comparison of the activities of alcohols and the corresponding fatty acids. In this study, saturated and uns...