Then there was the hand sanitizer. Lots and lots of hand sanitizer. I had bottles of hand sanitizer shoved in my face at least five times a day. I was required to put some on the second I walked onto the school grounds.
I already knew this, because it is should be common sense to everyone, but antibacterial soap and hand sanitizers are effective at killing bacteria... not viruses. Bacteria and viruses are different things, and antibacterial soaps and hand sanitizers do nothing to stop viruses. Swine flu is a virus. I tried explaining this to a couple Koreans last year, but to no avail.
Some alcohol based hand sanitizers claim to kill viruses, but it turns out it does nothing to stop the spread of airborne viruses like swine flu.
Article in the LA Times:
Spoiler alert: If the presence of all those alcohol-based hand sanitizers makes you feel safe from disease, skip this blog post.
The sanitizers – Purell, Germ-X and the like – started popping up everywhere last year following the outbreak of the H1N1 “swine flu” virus. But new research out of the University of Virginia finds that they are of no particular use in warding off the flu. They also failed to ward off rhinovirus, a major cause of the common cold.
The researchers, led by Dr. Ronald B. Turner, tested the sanitizers in real-world conditions. They asked 116 volunteers to carry around a sanitizer with “enhanced antiviral activity” and use it every three hours while they were awake. Another group of 96 volunteers followed their usual routines.
Researchers tracked them for 10 weeks, collecting specimens once a week to test for flu and rhinovirus. Additional samples were taken whenever a study participant complained of cold or flu-like symptoms.
It turned out that sanitizer users developed 12 flu infections per 100 volunteers, compared with 15 cases of flu per 100 volunteers in the group that didn’t do anything special. In addition, there were 42 cases of rhinovirus per 100 volunteers among the sanitizer users, versus 51 for the control group. Neither difference was statistically significant.
The researchers surmise that hand transmission is less important for these viruses than previously thought. Perhaps public health officials should pay more attention to how these viruses spread through the air, they said.
Previously, Turner and colleagues had established that alcohol-based sanitizers removed rhinovirus from hands better than soap and water.
The results were presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in Boston. The study was funded by the Dial Corp., which makes hand sanitizers and old-school soap.The study was funded by the Dial Corp. So it is ironic that they published findings that would hurt the sales of their own products.
I first heard about this on the Colbert Report. Check out this clip, this was one of the best threat downs I've ever seen on his show. Some funny stuff.
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| ThreatDown - Record Breaking Gays, Koalas & Purell<a> | ||||
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