ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

A new study has shown that there are no significant hand hygiene benefits in using an alcohol hand rub for more than 30 seconds at a time.

This emerged in an experiment carried out by Fernando Bellissimo-Rodrigues, a research fellow at the University of Geneva Hospitals. He contaminated the hands of 23 healthcare workers with Ecoli and then asked these volunteers to sanitise their hands for either 10, 15, 20, 30, 45 or 60 seconds.

All the participants used the same concentration of alcohol solution and each adhered to the WHO How to Handrub technique. Fingertip bacterial counts were collected before and after rubbing.

After adjustments were made for participants' gender and hand size, the data from 110 measurements indicated a significant trend of steadily decreasing bacterial counts when the duration of cleansing was increased.

However when the volunteers rubbed for 45 or 60 seconds, any declines in the bacterial count were found to be significantly smaller compared with those measured at 15, 20 and 30 seconds.

"From our data there doesn't seem to be a gain from performing hand hygiene for longer than 30 seconds," concluded Pires. "But of course more studies are needed to assess this in the clinical setting."