Soap is the best hand cleaner, student experiment finds

Students at Woy Woy Public School have conducted a hand-cleaning experiment which shows that "soap was the best cleaner".

Science teacher Mr David Owens said the students carried out a scientific experiment to determine which was the best method of cleaning hands.

He said the experiment showed "we should use soap as our first type of cleaner and then hand sanitiser if we don't have soap".

"Unclean hands spread the virus."

Mr Owens said that, in the experiment, students grew germs from their hands.

"We prepared petri dishes with an agar jelly for the germs to grow on then we touched each bit of jelly with our hands.

"We used dirty hands, hands washed with soap and hands washed with sanitiser.

"We also left one untouched as a control," Mr Owens said.

"To make it a fair test, we did exactly the same actions for each petri dish and then we taped them shut so no more germs could get in."

Mr Owens said that after allowing the bacteria time to grow: "We found that soap was the best cleaner as we found fewer bacteria growing on the agar jelly. Then hand sanitiser.

"The dirty hands grew the most bacteria."

SOURCE:

Newsletter, 19 Jun 2020

David Owens, Woy Woy Public School