Soap

Using soap is the best way to clean your hands

One of the most important messages we’ve tried to get across in this book is that washing your hands is key to avoiding a whole slew of illnesses, especially the common cold. Avoiding cold weather, dressing warmly, and making sure you dry your hair completely before heading outside will not keep you healthy. Neither vitamin C, nor echinacea, nor zinc, nor Airborne, nor Emergen-C will prevent you from catching a cold. Amidst all these things that don’t work, hand-washing is a clear winner.

Washing your hands makes you much less likely to be infected with the germs that cause all sorts of nasty problems like diarrhea or colds. In the literature about infections, experts recommend hand-washing time and time again. The general principle is that you should wet your hands with running water, put some soap on your hands, lather up, and then rub your hands together vigorously for at least twenty seconds. (That is a much longer time than you think. We bet it is much longer than you usually wash your hands.) Then you should rinse off your hands and dry them. Hand-washing is recommended after you prepare food, use the toilet, change diapers, touch animals, blow your nose, cough, handle garbage, or touch a sick person.

Many people assume that soap and water are vital when it comes to washing your hands. This is a half-truth. Using soap and water is the classic way to wash your hands, and it does remove much of the bacteria from your hands. However, just having soap and water is not necessarily good enough. Whether the hand-washing is going to protect you depends on the length of time you wash, how much soap you use, what type of soap you use, and how the soap is stored. Soap alone is not enough! The longer you wash, especially when you wash for more than fifteen seconds, the more bacteria you remove from your hands. Using more soap rather than less soap also improves the cleaning abilities, as does using an antimicrobial soap.

However, you cannot put your complete trust in soap. Soap can actually become contaminated with bacteria. Soap contamination has led to outbreaks of infections in places like neonatal intensive care units in hospitals, and bacteria can be cultured from soap in hospitals all around the world. Bar soaps and soaps that are stored improperly, especially in standing water, are more likely to be contaminated. If your only choice for washing your hands is a very dirty bar of soap sitting in grimy water on the edge of a sink, you may be better off skipping the soap altogether and maximizing the other elements of good hand-washing. In such a case, you should use lots of friction between your hands and wash for a long time. Using paper towels instead of the hot air dryer is also a very good idea.

Soap also becomes less important when you consider its competitor—the alcohol-based hand rub. These hand sanitizers have become popular around hospitals, offices, and schools for a very good reason. They work great! In most studies, alcohol-based hand rubs do better than hand-washing with soap and water at removing bacteria from the skin. There are a few types of bugs that cause infection through spores that seem to come off better with very vigorous hand-washing with soap and water, but the hand sanitizers win overall. If your only option is a hand sanitizer and not soap and water, you should be happy the hand sanitizer is actually the better choice. Moreover, not only does the hand sanitizer remove more bacteria from your hands, it is also cost-effective when you compare it to washing with soap and water.

We are still big fans of soap, but soap can’t make it on its own. You need to make sure you wash your hands long enough, with enough friction, and with a noncontaminated soap. Plus, using an alcohol-based hand gel or sanitizer may be a better choice.