Hand Washing vs. Sanitizer

Overview

Objectives/Goals That hand sanitizer is much more effective in reducing the amount of micro-organisms on hands than washing hands. Methods/Materials Materials 1. Warm running tap water 2. Dial hospital grade soaps 3. Surgical sterile towels 4. Sheep blood agar plates 5. Hospital microbiology incubator 6. Purell aloe formula hand sanitizer Method/Procedure First, 10 individuals washed their hands with warm water and dial hospital grade soap for 20 seconds. Each of them dried their hands with sterile towels. I swabbed each individual#s hands with culture swabs. After I applied the culture swabs to the blood agar plates. Second, 10 individuals sanitized their hands with hospital grade Purell aloe formula hand sanitizer for 20 seconds and dried their hands with sterile towels. I swabbed each individual#s hands and applied it on to the blood agar plates. Third, I swabbed 10 individual#s hands that did not wash their hands or sanitizer for comparison. Fourth, I took the blood agar plates to the lab and placed them in an incubator. It stayed in the incubator for 72 hours. Results Hand Sanitizer is more affective than hand washing. Conclusions/Discussion Post my experiment, my hypothesis was proven incorrect. The results indicate that sanitizer is much more affective in reducing micro-organisms count than hand washing.

Competition history

• CSEF 2011 Microbiology (Medical) (Junior Division Only) · Entry J1601

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Microbiology projects
• CSEF Microbiology projects
• Every CSEF 2011 project