I was always under the impression that the purpose of soap isn’t to kill bacteria/viruses as the article implies, but to wash those thing off of your hands.
Was my impression wrong?
Was my impression wrong?
https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/how-soap-kills-covid-19-h...
I was taught about the hydrophilic/hydrophobic nature of soaps and detergents in university decades ago; this is not new information, and is uncontroversial. As others have pointed out, it’s even easy to observe in simple home experiments.
I have never heard of soap disrupting the phospholipid shell of viruses; this is new and “interesting if true”.
The astoundingly bad handling of government communications during the pandemic makes me automatically skeptical of arguments from authority.
However, the takeaway of “wash your hands thoroughly to inhibit disease vector transmission” has amply been proven in the last century.
But in the specific case of COVID-19 soap happens to also destroy the virus particles and that turns out to be pretty valuable too. :)
We now know that people who are infected with Covid emit viral particles into the air while breathing normally. Those viral particles can float in the air for hours and the people who inhale them become infected.
> The most common way COVID-19 is transmitted from one person to another is through tiny airborne particles of the virus hanging in indoor air for minutes or hours after an infected person has been there.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/03/23/lets...
Previously we thought the only transmission route was that infected people who sneeze or cough spray large droplets that fall out of the air quickly, and the people who touch surfaces contaminated by those droplets and later touch a mucous membrane become infected.
So Covid has fully airborne transmission like the measles, not a droplet based spread like the flu. Hand washing is an effective mitigation for a virus with a droplet based spread, but not a virus with an airborne spread.
The Whitehouse post linked above discusses the sorts of mitigations that can be effective against an airborne virus.
Also, water alone does a lot to wash them away. Found this study of no-washing vs. water-washing vs. soap+water-washing with a quick search:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3037063/
No washing: 44% of hands intentionally touching doorknobs and railings had bacteria
Water alone: 23%
Water + soap: 8%
(edit: line breaks)
Covid news claimed loud that soap will disrupt virus membranes, killing it.