Does washing your hands kill the flu virus or just remove it? how?
Washing ones hands with soap and warm water removes most germs and viruses living upon you. This has been known for, what 2oo years now?
I read a study on antibacterial soap, (and yes I know the flu is a virus) and basically the study concluded that washing your hands was very effective and it mattered not whether you used antibacterial soap or regular soap.
They found the key was the amount of time washing your hand. It said you need to work up a good lather and rub your hands for between 30 seconds and a minute and make sure you get between the fingers and all over.
So it seems the amount of time and the rubbing gets the germs and allows the soap to rinse them away from you.
Indeed I’ve seen other studies where they found the common cold is not really spread through the air, so much as from hand to hand. They found people are touching their noses and the germs get on their hands and they leave the germs on things. And if you look at people and make an effort you can see how many times people do rub those nose without realizing it.
I remember asking my mother, who was the head nurse at a pediatric hospital in the 50s, during that polio outbreak, if she was afraid of getting polio. She was like “No Mark, we always washed our hands.”
So I guess it is a pretty good line of defense. I think we all forget just how effective our skin is in protecting us from germs. As long as there are no cuts or we’re not putting the germs on our skin to our noses
Incidentally, I heard an interview on NPR’s Science Friday several weeks ago where they talked to a scientist who studied cold viruses. He said that hand sanitizer is basically useless against the cold virus, since one of the distinguishing features that marks a cold virus from other viruses is that it survives in alcohol! Alcohol, of course, is the active ingredient in all liquid hand sanitizers.
They also had a flu guy on who said that it didn’t make much difference for flu either, since the flu virus is mostly spread through droplets in the air from coughing and sneezing. (This was long before the current swine flu outbreak. The CDC obviously thinks hand-to-hand and hand-to-surface are significant enough routes that they recommend frequent hand washing and using sanitizers.)