TAMPA, Fl. - Afternoons at the local YMCA are full of games and other activities. Plenty of fingers will touch a basketball during a game in the gym. And as the ball is passed around, it's easy to see how viruses and bacteria are spread.
What better place to test whether all hand sanitizers are the same. And if soap and water better protect our kids from illness. 16 nine and ten year olds were asked to try eight products - half namebrand hand sanitizers - half generics. Four others would try soap and/or just water.
The test worked like this: Each kid touched their finger tips to a petri dish before treatment. Then a squirt of hand sanitizer and they'd touched the petri dish again. Most hand sanitizers contain some kind of alcohol compound. Then the dishes were sent to a lab in Tampa for analysis.
"We put them into an incubator to allow the bacteria to grow. And as you can see, there are about 90 to 100 colonies," says Burt Anderson, head of the lab.
The results were pretty clear. One particular growth of bacteria on a dish was from Breanna Rivard's fingertips before she used Walgreens foaming hand sanitizer. Anderson compares that dish to the one she touched afterwards.
"In this case it was a hand sanitizer using the compound called benzalkonium choloride. You can see a drastic and dramatic reduction to no colonies at all," says Anderson.
And it was the Walgreens brand which did the best in these tests at reducing bacteria. In all, three different brands of hand sanitizer showed significant reductions in bacteria.
"So clearly these hands sanitizers have an effect in reducing the number of bacteria," says Anderson.
Four brands showed moderate to slight results. And only one showed little to no reduction.
But overall did hand sanitizers beat good old soap and water?
"In our particular case, and again our sampling is small, there was not a dramatic difference between the children that washed their hands with soap and water after washing in terms of the total number of bacteria growth," says Anderson. "I was a little surprised."
The Centers for Disease Control recommends you wash your hands using warm water and soap for about 20 seconds. But if you can't get to a sink...
"I think it shows the value of hand sanitizers. The CDC recommends it as an alternative to do that also to control the H1N1 virus and it has no negative effect but clearly reduces the number of microbes bacteria and viruses on your skin," says Anderson.
To see a complete list of the products tested and results or know the method used for the testing the kids, click the links at the top of the story.
