Plain Soap And Water Still Effective At Killing Bacteria

By Author: Dr. Victor Marchione
Total Articles: 90
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This health e-letter addresses the recent craze for the use of
antibacterial soaps in the war against germs. You see them
everywhere. They can be found in friends' and family

members' homes, in the library soap dispenser, in schools,
and public washrooms.

What's responsible for this recent fad? According to many
commercials, you need antibacterial soap to kill all the bad
bacteria that are out there waiting to cause disease. Ads
promote antibacterial cleansers that kill 99.9% of bacteria.

This sounds great, except that not all bacteria are bad. And
consider this health advice: repeated use of antibacterial
agents can cause those bacteria that are harmful to become
resistant.

This poses a problem when you think about how good
bacteria and bad bacteria normally coexist in your body.
Good bacteria actually compete with bad bacteria. This
competition prevents bad bacteria from aggressively
multiplying and causing illness. Your system is set up to
maintain a kind ...
... of internal balance for you. If you kill off
all the good bacteria, then the bad bacteria can multiply out
of control.

So what to do? A new study from the Department of
Infectious and Tropical Diseases, London School of
Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has found that
hand washing with plain soap may be just as effective at
killing bacteria as washing with antibacterial soap --
without the added complication of killing off good
bacteria.

The UK research team decided to investigate whether
hand washing with soap is more effective at reducing
contamination with bacteria associated with diarrhea than
using water only.

For the study, 20 volunteers contaminated their hands
deliberately by touching door handles and railings in public
spaces. They were then randomly assigned to one of three
groups: hand washing with water; hand washing with non-
antibacterial soap; and no handwashing. Each volunteer
underwent this procedure 24 times, yielding 480 samples
overall.

The research team found that bacteria of potential fecal
origin were found after no hand washing in 44% of
samples. Hand washing with water alone reduced the
presence of bacteria to 23%. Hand washing with plain soap
and water reduced the presence of bacteria to a mere eight
percent.

The researchers concluded that hand washing with non-
antibacterial soap and water is more effective for the
removal of bacteria of potential fecal origin from hands
than hand washing with water alone and is effective for the
prevention of transmission of diarrheal diseases.

If you would like to use some soap with a little more
bacterial-killing clout than the regular kind, try using tea
tree oil soap in the bathroom. It is naturally antiseptic and
antifungal. Lavender and peppermint are also antibacterial.
None of these alternative remedies should affect the
balance of good bacteria in your body.

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