How Soap 🧼 Absolutely
💦 Annihilates the 🧫 Coronavirus 🦠
😷👋🧼 👏💦🧽 🧫
💦 Annihilates the 🧫 Coronavirus 🦠
😷👋🧼 👏💦🧽 🧫
You’re not just washing viruses down the drain.
Soap destroys the coronavirus, a chemistry professor explains.
By Brian Resnick Mar 11, 2020
He explained why soap is such an effective Covid-19 killer and why it’s so important to soap your hands for at least 20 seconds.
As Covid-19
cases in the US surge to more than 1,000 and fear sweeps the country,
there’s one consumer product critical to our great national battle to “flatten the curve,” or slow the epidemic: soap. Humble, ancient, cheap, effective soap.
Respiratory viruses — like the novel coronavirus, the
flu, and the common cold — can be spread via our hands. If someone is
sick, a hand can touch some mucus and viral particles will stick to the
hand. If someone is well, hands act like sticky traps for viruses. We
can pick up droplets that contain the virus, and they’ll stay on our
hands, and perhaps enter our bodies if we touch our hands to our faces.
That’s why our hands are the front lines in the war against Covid-19. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends
washing hands with soap and water as the top way to clean our hands.
“But if soap and water are not available, using a hand sanitizer with at
least 60% alcohol can help,” the CDC says.
The CDC prioritizes soap. Yet, per news reports, people have been stocking up and hoarding sanitizer. The sanitizer situation is growing absurd: The Atlantic reported on a man who sold a bottle of Purell on eBay for $138. Hand sanitizer containing over 60 percent alcohol works against Covid-19 and is a good option when you’re not near a sink. But it’s
getting harder to find than a hypodermic needle in a haystack.
Sanitizer might feel like a modern-day, scientific, and more clinical upgrade to soap. But I’m here to tell you that soap — all sorts of it: liquid, solid, honeysuckle-scented, the versions inexplicably only marketed to men or women — is a badass, and even more routinely effective than hand sanitizer. We should be excited to use it, as much as possible.
That’s because when you wash your hands with soap and water, you’re not just wiping viruses off your hands and sending them down the drain. You’re actually annihilating the viruses, rendering them harmless. Soap “is almost like a demolition team breaking down a building and taking all the bricks away,” says Palli Thordarson, a chemistry professor at the University of New South Wales, who posted a viral Twitter thread on the wonders of soap.
In a recent phone call, he explained why soap is such an effective Covid-19 killer and why it’s so important to soap your hands for at least 20 seconds.
First up: What is Soap? 🧼
Soap, Thordarson explains, is common phrase for what chemists call “amphiphiles.” These are molecules that have a dual nature. One end of the molecule is attracted to water and repelled by fats and proteins. The other side of the molecule is attracted to fats and is repelled by water. (If you’re looking out for product labels, the most common soap is “sodium laureth sulfate” — it’s a detergent that’s often mixed with other chemicals to both clean our hands and not damage our skin.)
It’s this dual-nature chemical construction that makes soap so effective. “When you buy a conventional soap, it consists of a mixture of these amphiphiles,” Thordarson explains. And they all do the same thing.
Think about what happens when you pour some olive oil into water. The oil pools up in a mass that floats. “That’s because fats don’t mix with water,” he says. But mix some soap into the oil and water and the oil will disperse. Basically, that happens because the soap is attracted to the grease, via its fat-loving side, but then tears it up, pulling it into the water via its water-loving side. It’s a one-two punch. Surround the oil particles and move them away from one another.
Why does soap work so well on the SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus and indeed most viruses?
Because it is a self-assembled nanoparticle in which the weakest link is the lipid (fatty) bilayer. A two part thread about soap, viruses and supramolecular chemistry #COVID19
Palli Thordarson@PalliThordarson· Mar 11
1/9 It looks like my "soap" tweet has been quoted all over the place. Wonderful! I do though take a slight issue with the tone in some of these when it comes to soap vs hand sanitiser. Just because I said, soap is better, doesn't mean sanitiser are not good-they are very good!
1/9 It looks like my "soap" tweet has been quoted all over the place. Wonderful! I do though take a slight issue with the tone in some of these when it comes to soap vs hand sanitiser. Just because I said, soap is better, doesn't mean sanitiser are not good-they are very good!
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