Nokia just distributed germ-killing hand gels to each desk to protect us from swine flu. A colleague was dubious so I looked it up, and he's right, it's no protection.
A nurse writes: "Anti-bacterial hand gels - hand sanitizers do not kill viruses. They have a protein 'coating' of sorts that makes them harder to denature or 'kill' than bacteria."
And also, there's this:
Water was the most effective at removing stomach bug viruses from the hands, Emory University researchers find. They planted stomach bug viruses on volunteers' fingers and allowed them to dry. The results, presented this week at the American Society for Microbiology Meeting in Orlando, Fla., showed the percentage of the viruses removed by water, hand soap, and alcohol-based hand sanitizer. Water removed 96 percent of the virus; liquid antibacterial soap removed 88 percent; and the hand sanitizer removed only 46 percent.
Eliz again: so these hand sanitizers are just there to make us feel complacent?
4 comments:
Isn't that interesting - water is the best antiviral.
I wonder how that works, whether it rinses the viruses off or whether water has some antiviral properties?
This gives me a chuckle. Our company (through our Medical Compliance Officer) decreed we had to use a certain type of soap dispensed from a particular type of container to combat a rash of staph infections last year.
The soap had to be recalled because of several cases of severe testicular burns! Hehe! What makes it so funny are the forms we have to fill out for ANY saftey incident. Full descriptions, witness statements from everyone aboard, "root" cause analysis, lessons learned. (Now we have to fill out a form if someone takes an aspirin or pepto-bismol)
We still use the dispensers and the liquid soap, but a different one. You still have to touch the dispenser to get the soap, so I'm not sure how it helps all that much, but it does make everyone feel better.
Reminds me of the stories you hear about visitors to casualty to have vacuum cleaners removed from certain parts of their anatomy. "I was vacuuming in my robe, when..."
All this stuff is such hooey, really, unless you're about to perform surgery, in which case utter perfect antisepsis is paramount (especially if you're cuttin' on ME!:):)---I am terribly casual about stuff like this, to the point of careless, and have had precisely TWO headcolds in the past three years---one very recently, the last before that in March 2007 (I remember because I had to stay home from LE's fancy firm meeting down in New Orleans, and was mightily displeased.) I have a personal and highly unscientific theory that by not being over-fussy about hand-scrubbing and mask-wearing and such, we actually build up immunities. Bottom line, if you're gonna catch a bug, you're gonna catch it, and all the obsessive-compulsive measures in the world won't keep you safe.
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