Hand Hygiene for Infection Prevention

Abstract

Natural disasters may lead to infectious disease outbreaks when they result in poor hygiene conditions and substantial population displacement of evacuation shelters. In this paper, we introduced hand hygiene for infection prevention in evacuation shelters and the function of surfactants for hand hygiene. Hand hygiene is effective for infection prevention and it is important to wash hands with a hand cleanser or disinfect with a hand sanitizer in an appropriate way. Surfactants play roles for hand hygiene. For example, surfactants remove dirt from the skin surface while do not affect the skin function, and help antiseptic materials work efficiently. Furthermore, surfactants can be expected to have inactive effects on envelope viruses in terms of lipid membrane destruction and protein denaturizing. Recently, inactive effects of some surfactants were confirmed against SARS-CoV-2. In the future, if the effectiveness of surfactants is further clarified, it will be possible to propose surfactants and new products with inactive effects for various pathogenic microorganisms.