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Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

What about cooking? e.g. handling raw meat and such?

Regular soap works perfect here. You just need something to help breakdown the lipids and remove from the surface of your skin.

What's wrong with regular soap? It worked fine for decades.

You don't need to kill the bacteria. Just remove it.

Soap is a remarkably good antibacterial as well. Im on mobile but will try to look up refs for this later. I used to work in this area and a colleague was an expert on antibacterial properties of detergents.

Yes, cell membranes are largely made of phospholipids. Soap can disrupt the membrane and essentially leak the contents of cells.

> You don't need to kill the bacteria. Just remove it.

I'm pretty sure the lipid-dissolving properties of soap kill bacteria by shredding their cell membranes. It's not effective against viruses, but neither is antibacterial soap.

Thanks for the correction.

We seem doing well with most workers in butcher shops and restaurants just washing their hands with regular soap.

Are they, though? I suspect most butcher shops and restaurants are using antibacterial soap at this point. I go out of my way to try to buy non-antibacterial soap and it's often impossible to find. I imagine most businesses just order whatever's the first thing they see in the catalog/web site, and it's probably antibacterial because that's what most people think they want at home.

Impossible to find? Where do you shop? Where I live, the non-antibacterial soap outnumbers the anti-bacterial soap 4:1 or more on the shelves.

Can confirm that where I live near Houston it's very difficult to find.

It is actually more important to wash your hands properly than it is to use antibacterial soap. This is why most restaurants and medical facilities teach folks how to do it - and why some places install timers on their sinks. Basically, you need to lather for 10-15 seconds, making sure to get between the fingers, top part of the wrist, and your fingernails.

I've heard this action is actually more important than the soap bit for the anti-bacterial properties. But soap helps remove things like grease and 'juice' from the meat really well and helps us be less lazy when doing so.

Well, if you're cooking, the bacteria on the raw meat and whatever you added with your hands get cooked. Most skin bacteria probably don't do too well in the mouth and stomach anyways.

Cross contamination is almost always the concern here. Handle raw -> prepping vegetables for a salad, for instance. Or handling chicken then almost anything else.

Which is again handled by simply washing the bacteria off of your hands and down the drain.

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