MCC BIO235 Unit 3 Discussion Latest 2021 October

BIO235 Introduction to Microbiology

Unit 3 Discussion

Soaps and Antiseptics

In an effort to become a healthier, cleaner society, we all understand the importance of hand washing. Soap companies in the last few years have introduced antibacterial soaps with the antibacterial ingredient Triclosan.  Triclosan was banned from soap products in 2017 but is still allowed in toothpaste. Moreover, Triclosan does not readily degrade and is said to stay active in the water, thus opening an opportunity for bacteria to become resistant to Triclosan and other similar antibacterial agents.  These large companies also promote hand sanitizers, which are primarily alcohol (about 70%), and don’t require water and rinsing. Hand sanitizers may destroy the bacterial cell wall, but with no rinsing the dirt and other molecules are still on your hands. 

Hospitals now allow employees to skip hand washing between patients if the hands are not visibly soiled and instead use just hand sanitizers. Today there are over 200 different types of antibacterial soaps on the market, so, with all these soaps and hand sanitizer products, shouldn’t we be much healthier? And with the advent of Covid-19 we have used hand sanitizers over, and over and over again.  With all of this hand washing and use of hand sanitizers we should be able to stop the spread of disease - right??!  In actuality disease rates have not changed due to the increase usage of these products, and we are in a multi-year Covid pandemic. 

So what should we do? Stop using antibacterial soaps? Should we formulate new ones? Or should we just use the Hand sanitizers? Or not? Do you think and sanitizers are increasing bacterial drug resistance as well? Should we just go back to old fashioned bar soap?  Is it OK for clinicians to just use hand sanitizer between patients?

 Express your original thought/post as a New Thread, then make at least one reply to at least 2 different classmate’s original posts. 10 points total