Dirty hand mould experiment goes viral

17th of January 2020
Dirty hand mould experiment goes viral

A Facebook post about a school hand-washing experiment has gone viral after it revealed the unsightly fungus that can grow on dirty surfaces.

Teacher Dayna Robertson and behaviour specialist Jaralee Metcalf wanted to demonstrate the importance of hand washing to ward off germs. So they took five slices of bread and asked 17 pupils in their third-grade class to touch three of them.

One of the slices was touched with the children's newly-washed hands, while the second was handled with sanitised hands and the third with unwashed hands.

The fourth slice of bread was rubbed on to laptops used by the children in class and the fifth was left untouched. The teachers then sealed all five slices in Ziplock bags and left them for three weeks.

At the end of the trial, the untouched bread and the slice handled with clean hands remained more or less unchanged. But an unsightly mould had grown on the other three slices with the heaviest covering of mould forming on the bread that had been used to wipe the children's laptops.

The experiment was staged late last year at the Discovery Elementary School in Idaho. Jaralee Metcalf's wrote on her Facebook post: ‘We did a science project in class this last month as flu season was starting as somebody who is sick and tired of being sick and tired of being sick and tired. Wash your hands! Remind your kids to wash their hands! And hand sanitiser is not an alternative to washing hands!! At all!"

The post went viral with 63,000 shares and 17,000 likes.

 

Our Partners

  • ISSA Interclean
  • EFCI
  • EU-nited