From recent evidence, I learned that most of the people washed their hands for about 10 seconds.
However, I did not find any microbial data of short hand rubbing. Please let me know if there is any.
http://www.hyginex.com/why-duration-matters-when-improving-hand-hygiene-compliance/
http://www.foodsafety.govt.nz/elibrary/industry/handwashing-drying-duration-hand-washing/FW0921_Handwashing_evidence_base_Mar_2009.pdf
These links are likely a good place to start. Hope it helps.
The ideal time to perform hand hygiene depends on many factors, mainly if hands are visibly soiled, or have been in contact with humans fluids. In this case, you should perform hand hygiene with water and soap as usual which takes at least one minute. But when hand is not visible soiled ot have not been in contact with humans fluids, you can do hand hygiene with alcohol gel, which takes between 10 and 15 seconds. This is an interesting method, as increases the compliance to hand hygiene.
You should consider to that alcohol is not capable to kill bacterias such as Clostridium difficile, so in some cases it's not a valid choice for hand hygiene.
You should look for alcohol based hand rub.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/677145
Dear Jerome:
Thank you very much for sharing the links. These are really helpful. I have gone through all the documents. From the 3rd link (Report), I have found some important guidance on short hand rubbing time. I my recent published paper I also recommended for 15 sec rubbing. From J.-C. Lucet et. al (2002), I have also learned that rubbing for 10 s with regular bar soap also reduced hand contamination (not sure about the significant level?).
Thank you again !!
Dear Juan:
Thanks for following the question. In south east Asia Poor people hardly use hand sanitizer due to cost and alcohol present in it. Probably due to highly contaminated environment people also dont like to use hand sanitizer as the hands look moist and dirty most of the time. Since a number of evidence showed that people usually wash their hands only for 5-7 seconds and the behavior is not changing for long term hand rubbings, this might be worth working on health impact after rubbing for less than 10 s rubbing in the community.
I think, focus should also be on frequency of hand wash per day. as it also has impact of low transmission of disease.
Probably the period of rubbing is less of a factor than frequency of hand washing; if the hands are frequently cleansed the level of contamination will remain minimal. Consider professionals like doctors and food handlers who wash their hands every time they touch a patient or handle food item; they hardly take a 30 s washing their hands because of the frequency. These individuals might be excellent study subjects for the topic on length of time for hand-washing.
Recent study (unpublished) of university students queuing for meals showed that heavily contaminated hands are not effectively decontaminated with ordinary soap and water when washing is briefly done. In this study (fearful of sounding biased) it was established that ladies' hands tended to carry more diverse variety of micro-organisms requiring extended washing period.
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