Quote:
Originally Posted by Leo656
So just to take a second and go onto something I read a few times over the years, but I thought it was pretty well accepted as fact by now that hand sanitizer is kind of a joke and is no substitute for simply washing one's hands with soap and hot water for more than five seconds? Did that suddenly change? Or is it just a "better safe than sorry" thing?
I know for a fact that nobody washes their goddamn hands properly, since I'm around people all the time and am something of a low-level germaphobe on account of I used to get sick a lot. But as I understand it, hand sanitizer doesn't do much of anything if you don't actually, y'know, wash your f*cking hands.
Did I miss a meeting?
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I've got maybe three things on that - one is training grade, the other is something I've read the last few days and the third is experiential.
The
training thing is that in first responder training we were taught that the best decontamination is soap and water in repetition, and that the "magic number" is 20 seconds. It seems that healthcare officials widely don't even care why this is. It's simple enough that 20 seconds is the magic number when most foreign particles simply dislodge from skin adhesion under soap as it breaks water on your skin.
The
thing I read was that making hand sanitizer at home is apparently pretty easy if you want to do it using rubbing alcohol, aloe vera lotion and something scented if you care about that kind of thing. And apparently it's pretty easy to make it at a greater than 60% alcohol ratio, which I guess is the minimum recommended.
The
experiential thing is that I had a search event take place in a small, confined and contaminated area once. The mitigation action by the nurses was to pour bleach on my hands and then rinse them under running water. True story and I followed their protocol, but I couldn't help but wonder if this was problematic. Nothing ever came of it in my case, which is good. But I wouldn't recommend it. I later found that doing this can actually make your skin dry out, causing micro-fissures in your hands where contaminants could actually get under your skin. So basically, back to square one, man. Soap and water, magic number is 20 seconds.