Washing Your Hands Sounds Vain – Here’s The Science That Causes It
As COVID-19 and the flu continue to spread across the country, everyone from your colleagues to the CDC wants you to wash your hands. While hand sanitizer is a great option, it is still the second-best hand wash in the past.
“There is no substitute for controlling the spread of germs in handwashing – nothing we do will work like that,” said Russell Buhr, MD, Ph.D., a lung and critical care physician at UCLA Medical Center. “If you look at it historically, it used to be that infant mortality was a big problem, wasn’t it? Most of it was because people didn’t wash their hands properly, because we didn’t understand what germs were and how they work.”
Why is hand washing so effective? “Some of the equipment, the act of scrubbing and cleaning that removes this deadly virus,” said Dr. Buhr. “We know that soap helps reduce germs because soap works by removing fat and lipids so the germs are surrounded by a lipid shell.” He says that chemical soap kills germs.
“It sounds strange, but soap is an amazing weapon we all have in our homes,” said Karen Fleming, Ph.D., scientist, and professor at Johns Hopkins University, on Twitter. “This is because the coronavirus is a ‘covered’ virus, which means it has an outer layer of the lipid membrane. Washing your hands with soap and water has the power to ‘break down’ this oily layer and kill the virus.”
The first reason people get sick is not that someone coughs in the face, says Dr. Buhr, but because someone sneezes in their hand and opens the door, the next person touches the door handle, and then touches the eyes, nose, or mouth. In the operating room, the most important thing that health professionals do to protect their patients is to wash their hands. “We still wear gloves, sterile coats, masks, and hats, and all that,” he said, “but that’s a second-hand wash.”
To make sure you wash your hands thoroughly, Dr. Buhr recommends washing your hands with hot water that you can tolerate without burning yourself with soap and soap between 30 and 45 seconds – the time it takes to sing the letters of the word twice. “And then as you leave the bathroom, if you dry your hands with a paper towel, then keep that paper towel and use it by hand to open the door, then throw the paper towel in the back so you don’t quickly pick up a lot of germs from your colleagues who may not be as good a citizen as you are.”.
Hand sanitizer works well, he says, but it doesn’t accomplish all those things. “In a nutshell, hand sanitizer is much better than anything, alcohol will still destroy the outside of the virus and that will help dry out and kill it, but we still encourage people to wash their hands regularly to get rid of hand sanitizer residues and anything that may be dead and dirty and dirty. , “says Dr.