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Healthy Life Styles
Study: Soap
and water work best in ridding hands of viruses
Posted March
22, 2005
Courtesy University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
and World Science staff
The largest
study ever done comparing the effectiveness of hand hygiene products
shows that nothing works better than simply washing hands with
good old-fashioned soap and water, researchers say.
Among the
viruses that soapy hand washing flushes down the drain is the
one that causes the common cold. Other removable viruses cause
hepatitis A, acute gastroenteritis and a host of other illnesses.
A separate
finding was that waterless handwipes only removed roughly 50 percent
of bacteria from volunteers' hands.
"We studied
the efficacy of 14 different hand hygiene agents in reducing bacteria
and viruses from the hands," said Emily E. Sickbert-Bennett,
an epidemiologist with the University of North Carolina Health
Care System. "No other studies have measured the effectiveness
in removing both bacteria and viruses at the same time."
For the first
time, too, the researchers tested what happened when people cleaned
their hands for only 10 seconds, Sickbert-Bennett said. That was
the average length of time researchers observed health-care personnel
washing or disinfecting their hands at work.
"Previous
studies have had people clean their hands for 30 seconds or so,
but that's not what health-care workers usually do in practice,
and we wanted to test the products under realistic conditions,"
she said.
Anti-microbial
agents were best at reducing bacteria on hands, but waterless,
alcohol-based agents had variable and sometimes poor effects,
becoming less effective after multiple washes, Sickbert-Bennett
said. For removing viruses from the hands, physical removal with
soap and water was best.
A report on the findings appears in the March issue of the American
Journal of Infection Control.
"These
findings are important because health-care associated infections
rank in the top five causes of death, with an estimated 90,000
deaths each year in the United States," said William A. Rutala
of the University of North Carolina, a coauthor of the study.
"Hand hygiene agents have been shown to reduce the incidence
of health-care associated infections, and a variety of hand hygiene
agents are now available with different active ingredients and
application methods.
"Our
study showed that the anti-microbial hand washing agents were
significantly more effective in reducing bacteria than the alcohol-based
handrubs and waterless handwipes," he said. "Our study
also showed that, at a short exposure time of 10 seconds, all
agents with the exception of handwipes demonstrated a 90 percent
reduction of bacteria on the hands."
Alcohol-based
handrubs were generally ineffective in demonstrating a significant
reduction of a hardy virus, Rutala said. While the use of alcohol-based
handrubs will continue to be an important infection control measure,
the researchers added, it is important to recommend or require
traditional hand washing with soap and water throughout each day.
In the study,
the researchers contaminated 62 volunteers' hands with relatively
harmless microbes, then had them clean their hands with various
methods, and recorded the outcome.
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/050322_handwashfrm.htm
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