Always wash your hands. Always. Be in a constant state of washing your hands. I'm washing my
hands right now.
Hi everybody, Trace here for DNews. Simple question: Do you wash your hands after using
a public bathroom? If you’re like the American adults surveyed in 2010, 96 percent of you
said yes. Which means 6 percent of you are liars. That’s according to a 2013 Michigan
State study published in the Journal of Environmental Health. Go green!
To be fair, you can’t expect people to self-report accurately, especially if it’s on something
like handwashing, where we all feel the pressure to be hygienic. And a 90 percent wash rate
is still pretty darn spiffy. But the bigger question is: how many people wash their hands
correctly?
That’s the real answer that the Michigan State study was searching for. To find it
they had a dozen research assistants post up in bathrooms across Lansing and take notes.
As long as they didn't go to the Landshark, amirite guys? The assistants were trained
in the art of stealth so as not to draw suspicion. They watched over 3,700 bathroom goers and
organized their results by gender, age, time of day, bathroom cleanliness, hand dryer availability,
time spent washing, sink type, pretty much every variable you can think of.
According to their findings: 10 percent of people didn’t wash, 23 percent of people
just wetted their hands and called it a day, and 67 percent of people used soap. But here's
the thing: just using soap isn’t enough. The goal here is to kill bacteria, and to
do that you’ve got to give your hands a good long scrub. The researchers found only
5 percent of people washed their hands with soap for 15 seconds or longer. If 15 seconds
sounds like overkill, the Centers for Disease Control actually recommend scrubbing for twenty
seconds. Their guidelines for safe washing encourage you to hum happy birthday from beginning
to end twice, as though the tune wasn’t agonizing enough once a year. But to reiterate,
only 5 percent of people wash their hands correctly using this one weird trick.
That trick, is using soap. Why soap? Because of it's unique properties. A soap molecule
looks like a snake. The head is a carboxylate that loves water and the tail is a hydrocarbon
chain that hates it! When these molecules are mixed with H2O, they form little structures
called micelles, with the heads on the exterior and the tails inside, kind of like circling
the wagons. Like most things in nature, they are polar, they carry an electrical charge.
Since they're all negatively charged, the micelles repel each other distributing throughout
the water. When these micelles come in contact with grease and oil, the hydrocarbon part
(on the inside) grabs the oil, trapping it, lifting it off your skin and suspending it
in the water so it can be washed away. This behavior allows you to scrub the microbes
under the dirt into oblivion, and is also why alcoholic hand sanitizers aren’t as
effective at killing germs on dirty and greasy hands.
You may be tempted then to splurge for antibacterial soap -- but though it sounds good, it’s
actually the worst. The key ingredient, triclosan, does kill 99 percent of bacteria, but 42 years
of FDA research has shown it’s not much more effective at killing harmful bacteria
than regular soap and friction. And a side-effect of the unnecessary overuse of antibacterial
triclosan is bacteria have adapted to be resistant to it. Thus, there's no way to kill those
superbugs effectively when we need to. Like when people get sick from diseases that could
have been prevented from washing their hands in the first place. 31 percent of diarrhea
cases and 21 percent of respiratory illnesses like colds can be avoided just with some scrubbing.
See, washing your hands is a win against harmful bacteria on every level, and it feels good.
Just remember, stick to regular soap, give your hands a nice long scrub, and don’t
forget to get under the fingernails where most microbes live.
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You may be freaked out about germs but that’s because you’re lacking in civic pride. I
have more about your city’s microbes here. Go local spores team!
So do you scrub enough or do you live life on the edge?
Let us know in the comments, subscribe for more, and I will see you next time on DNews.