Tag: handwash

  • Study reveals COVID-19 can survive on human skin for nine hours

    Study reveals COVID-19 can survive on human skin for nine hours

    Japanese researchers have discovered that COVID-19 stays on human skin for nine hours, stressing the need for frequent hand washing to fight the on-going pandemic.

    The pathogen that causes the flu, by comparison, survives on human skin for about 1.8 hours, said the study, published this month in the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal.

    The study backs World Health Organisation guidance for regular and thorough hand washing to limit the spread of the virus.

    “The nine-hour survival of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus strain that causes COVID-19) on human skin may increase the risk of contact transmission in comparison with IAV (influenza A virus), thus accelerating the pandemic,” the study underscored.

    “The longer survival of SARS-CoV-2 on the skin increases contact-transmission risk; however, hand hygiene can reduce this risk,” the study said.

    Both the contagious diseases, the COVID-19 and the flu virus are inactivated within 15 seconds by applying ethanol that is used in the hand sanitizers.

  • Woman discovers she has been washing her hands with cheese

    Woman discovers she has been washing her hands with cheese

    A woman in the US accidentally washed her hands with a block of cheese for days after mistakenly thinking it was a bar of soap.

    Miley from Vancouver, Washington, became confused after realising her soap wasn’t foaming as usual, before she discovered it was in fact a lump of cheddar. She was trying to do her bit to stop the spread of coronavirus by thoroughly washing her hands with a bar of soap.

    Unfortunately, she instead succeeded in spreading some rather mature looking cheddar on her hands over the course of several days.

    Sharing her sorry tale on Reddit, Miley explained how the cheese ended up being mistaken for a bit of soap after it was left out of the fridge following a drunken late-night snack.

    Waking the next morning, she assumed that the lump was the remnants of a bar of soap. She also was keen to stress that she does actually keep a bar of yellow, unscented soap nearby for such use with the two evidently getting mixed up.

    “Just realised my soap wasn’t working because it’s literally a block of cheese,” she wrote.

    “I use a liquid soap for the dishes, bar soap like this is gentler on my hands after I do chores if that makes any sense [sic].”

    “It was a couple days of ‘Why isn’t this foaming?!’

    “I come to realise it was a dried-out square of Tillamook sharp cheddar cheese. I suspect I left it out when I was intoxicated and just forgot.”