Transcripts

Nicolas Bakalar:
Washing your hands is really the best defense against disease and the best defense against transmitting it.

Nicholas Bakalar author of the book Where The Germs Are, A Scientific Safari.

When you go to the bathroom, you should wash your hands. It's always a good idea to do that. You really should scrub your hands for 20 or more seconds using soap and warm water, and wash them off thoroughly and if possible, dry it with a paper towel. This means that you're not touching the same towel that someone else touched.

And you don't need fancy anti-bacterial soap. Plain old soap is just fine.

In fact, anti-bacterial hand cleaners are essentially a lot of hooey, because they don't provide any more germ protection than ordinary washing with soap and water, and if you read the labels of these anti-bacterial hand cleaners, there's nowhere on the label that it says that it'll improve your health or protect you against disease. And there's good reason for that because it is against the law to say that. The Federal Trade Commission won't allow them to say that, because it isn't true. There's no scientific evidence at all that using an anti-bacterial hand cleaner will improve your health or prevent disease. What it does, of course, is the same as soap and water, it washes things down the drain. And while it may say on the label it kills 99.9 % of germs, that really refers to a lab test and not anything that happens in the real world. And if it did in the real world, kill 99.9% of germs, that wouldn't do anything for your health.

For transcripts, visit our website, somethingyoushouldknow.net. I'm Mike Carruthers and that's "Something You Should Know."