After decades of hard work educating school children, the British workforce and catering sector employees - and especially our healthcare - of the importance of hand washing, it appears that the majority of us are using the facilities supplied. 

That is a major achievement, but organisations and employers are innocently sabotaging their employee and visitor hand hygiene to reduce the cost of soap used. This is because ‘bulk fill’ dispensing systems, which are ‘topped up’ from large bottles, are installed as they are perceived to provide cost savings. The safer alternative is to fit dispensers that use factory filled cartridges that are Sanitary Sealed and 100% bacteria free. It has been proved by a leading medical professor that soap from ‘bulk fill’ dispensers can put back as many bacteria onto your hands as you have just washed off - what a waste of all that employee education!

Microbiologist Dr Charles Gerba of the University of Arizona, discovered in his latest study of 500 soap samples from open refillable (bulk) soap dispensers, that a phenomenally high percentage of dispensers were contaminated - an average of 74% contained Coliforms*. In addition, opportunistic pathogens found included Klebsiella (could cause pneumonia, bronchitis and other respiratory infections), Enterobacter (nenonatal meningitis) and Serratia Marcescens (infections of blood, wounds, eye infections, respiratory tract).

When checking his research by business sector, Dr Gerba found that 88% of food service soap dispensers, 86% of office, 68% of retail and 55% of health club dispensers carried Coliforms - not exactly what you expect to find when you go to work, shopping, out for a meal or visiting the sports centre loo.

“Every time someone washes their hands using soap from an open refillable reservoir dispenser, regardless of whether it is plastic or stainless steel, they are gambling with their health,” said Dr Gerba. Dr Gerba discovered that 25% of refillable bulk soap dispensers contain unsafe levels of contamination. 16% had illness-causing faecal bacteria and you could be putting hundreds of millions of faecal bacteria onto your hands - more than an average toilet contains after flushing. The research found that bulk fill dispensers contained 15 different organisms, several of which were linked to food borne illness.

Why are bulk fill systems so contaminated with bacteria? Bulk soap dispensers are open to the environment making them an ideal bacteria breeding ground. Sources of bacteria range from those aerosolised from toilet flushing, those blown around the washroom by warm air hand dryers, hand transfer from users or persons refilling dispensers, inadequate cleaning and incorrect refilling. Bulk soap dispensers are continually refilled, so the new soap poured on top of the old becomes tainted. All soaps, including the anti-microbial hand washes, can become contaminated in open dispensers.

Dr Gerba’s research highlighted that one in four bulk soap dispensers in public washrooms is contaminated with organisms that could cause pneumonia, bronchitis, meningitis, respiratory infections, blood, wound, eye or urinary tract infections and central nervous system abscesses. This begs the question - why wash your hands if the soap provided to clean them puts your health at risk? Shouldn’t open bulk fill soap dispensers carry hand hygiene health warnings or better still be replaced by safer dispensing methods?

Look for the hidden costs

If you are thinking of installing open bulk fill dispensers because you are told that they are cheaper to operate, consider first what it costs per week for a person off sick with an infection picked up from the soap dispenser? What is the real cost of salary and lost work for just one person - a lot more than you ‘might’ save from bulk buying soap for a year?  If one person picks up an infection leading to an illness from the dispenser the chances are that many others will suffer unnecessarily too and that will cost you serious money.

Dr Gerba’s research illustrated that it is impossible to effectively clean refillable dispensers. Frequently, soap is wasted by overfilling or spilling when refilling. These dispensers take more maintenance time than inserting bacteria free factory sealed cartridges. His study also confirmed that GOJO factory sealed refill cartridges contained no pathogens. There really is no favourable argument for refillable dispensers. They should take their rightful place in the history of washroom systems, along with hard sulphite toilet tissue.

One simple solution

Hand washing is something we should all do each time we visit the washroom, before we eat or prepare food, when contaminated or dirty - probably, for most of us, that is between 10 and 20 times a day. The best solution for hand hygiene and hand care is to wash with soap from a dispenser fitted with Sanitary Sealed refill cartridges. Studies by Keith Redway, microbiologist at the University of Westminster, prove that drying is best with a paper towel, not a warm air dryer.  After washing or when away from soap and water it is advisable to sanitise your hands. It is best to apply GOJO Hand Medic professional skin conditioner to nourish the skin twice a day - at breaks, the end of the day or at night. Those in the catering, food or healthcare sectors who hand wash more frequently need more moisturising and regular sanitising.

How often do we arrive at work having held a handle or strap on the bus or train and then eaten something without hand washing? When traveling through an international airport do we ever consider the range of bacteria from around the world that we could have collected from the escalator prior to eating our burger with our hands? If only bacteria were visible to the human eye I think we would take a totally different view on how we view hand hygiene.

*Coliforms are illness causing fecal-based organisms and these were found in 50-55% of the contaminated samples.

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For more information visit: www.international.gojo.co.uk