Do you always find yourself washing your hands with warm water thinking that that will get you some better clean hands? Do you prefer the antibacterial soap over the normal ones? A shocking answer there is no difference, they all clean your hands the same way.
A new study conducted at new jersey at USA, and its results were published at The Journal of Food Protection that cold water kills exactly the same number of germs as the warm water. Moreover, they found that the antibacterial soap is not better than the normal one as both do the job exactly the same.
The researchers found that the key for a successful hand wash and killing the bacteria, is not the temperature of the water or the type of the soap we use, instead it is the duration we spend scrubbing our hands with soap, as they recommended it is not less than 10 seconds.
Professor Donald Schaffner from Rutgers University at the USA who supervised the research said that though warm water is the most comfortable for the body, but the study showed clearly that the temperature is nearly ineffective for killing germs.
And through the study that was done on 21 persons for 6 months long, it was proved that the amount of soap used or its type and the water temperature was useless and that all of them are secondary factors and not major at all.
And though all of this warm water helps in washing hands more than the cold one, as it helps in getting rid of the soap way faster but the temperature doesn’t affect the bacteria as only if the temperature reached the boiling level it could start helping but it will burn the hands of course.
And this study may affect the utilization of energy at many countries as USA as a huge part of it goes for boiling the water at restaurants and public places.
As in USA restaurants and public places that has water taps are restricted to 38 degrees, but after this study some new rules must be settled to use this energy properly instead of wasting it.