Ivy Lunceford

Handwashing vs Hand Sanitizer

Hygiene can cause someone to become sick, even hand hygiene can
cause someone to become very ill without anyone realizing why they have
become ill. The article claims that Diarrheal and respiratory diseases are
leading causes of child mortality. Diarrhea claims the lives of 1.87 million
children less than five years of age in the world per year. (Pickering)
Diarrhea and respiratory diseases can be caused by fecal-oral route by
pathogens. This can be caused by not washing hands correctly and passing
germs from one surface to another. There are different ways to clean hands
such as washing hands with soap and water and using hand sanitizer.
Pathogens are formed when people do not clean their hands after doing
activities such as changing a diaper, being outside, and touching surfaces
that may have dirt on them.
This article discusses an experiment between the efficiency of washing
hands vs using hand sanitizer. They had many different subjects for this
experiment. The experiment was get the dirt baseline of one subjects hands
without washing it, then washing the other hand with either soap and water
or hand sanitizer. Each subject inserted his or her hand into a 69-oz WhirlPak bag (NASCO Corp., Fort Atkinson, WI) containing 350 mL of clean water.
The subject was instructed to shake his or her hand vigorously in the water
and to rub his or her thumb and fingers together for 15 seconds, after which
an enumerator massaged the hand through the plastic for an additional 15

Ivy Lunceford

seconds. When the subject removed his or her hand, he or she was provided
with a clean paper towel to dry the hand completely. (Pickering) Afterwards
they followed the same process to the hand that they had just washed with
their choice of soap or sanitizer.
Working in a medical field I always imagined that using soap and water
was more efficient and that using hand sanitizer in between washing hands
would help eliminate many germs. The results were a little different, they
found that those that use hand sanitizer reduced more bacteria than those
who washed their other hand with soap and water. In a comparison of the
efficacy of hand sanitizer versus handwashing with soap and water among
adult mothers, hand sanitizer performed significantly better than
handwashing with soap. (Pickering)
This study could help children all over. Children do not always wash
their hands with soap for the amount of time that can eliminate bacteria.
They usually just get their hands wet and wipe them off on their pants or
clothing which may have more bacteria than their hands did. If kids just
used a little bit of hand sanitizer and rubbed hands together, it could help
with germ elimination. Not everyone throughout the world are able to have
supply to fresh water to wash their hands. Using hand sanitizer could help
eliminate the passing of germs from one surface to another.

Ivy Lunceford

Article used for this paper was

Efficacy of Waterless Hand Hygiene Compared with
Handwashing with Soap: A Field Study in Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania
Amy J. Pickering, Alexandria B. Boehm, Mathew Mwanjali, and Jennifer Davis*
Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, School of Earth Sciences and Civil and Environmental Engineering, and
Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, California; Population Services International, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania