Germs and bacteria are all around us and to protect ourselves from

getting sick, we wash our hands. You may be wondering, how effective is
soap really? Well, bacteria and viruses like to stick to our hands when we
touch dirty items like money or TV remotes. Washing hands reduces the
amount of bacteria so that our immune system can easily fight it. The best
method to reduce germs is to wash for at least 20 seconds and scrub your
hands hard. Soap is a detergent, which means one side is hydrophilic and
the other hydrophobic. Detergents like soap do an excellent job dissolving
membranes of the germs which then kills the bacteria completely. I chose
the topic of bacteria and germs or life science because I felt the need to
inform myself and others about cleanliness and finding out the reasoning
behind why and how people got sick. I believe that if I know the source of
the cause of sickness, I can prevent it from the start of hand-washing.

My plan was to test different types and brands of soap to wash a dirty
towel that represented your hand. I wanted to compare the amounts of dirt
and bacteria from before and after. I ended up filling a beaker with 1000mL
of water and mixing in 250mL of dirt. I folded the towel soaked it in dirt for 7
seconds then rinsed the towel with whatever soap brand I planned to test at
that time for 30 seconds. I then squeezed the water from that towel into a
small dish and got a pipette and ejected that into a Hemocytometer to
measure the bacteria. Finally, I put the dish under a microscope and
counted the bacteria and estimated the dirt. I repeated that for two trials
then repeated the same process for all the soaps.

The experiment took about 3-4 hours to complete. Trying to figure out
which dots were bacteria and how to measure the bacteria and locating
materials took a long time. I learned that hand sanitizer was only slightly
better than only running water. In reality, after counting bacteria, hand
sanitizer doesn’t do much compared to just water. In order from greatest to
least bacteria: running water, hand sanitizer, hand soap, and bar soap.
There was a lot of dirt and bacteria with just running water. The grid that
the Hemocytometer showed was extremely full with dots everywhere. On
the other hand, the bar soap’s graph was almost completely empty, with
only a few bacteria and dirt remaining. My hypothesis was that hand soap
would remove the most bacteria because I thought that bar soap retained
previous bacteria and wouldn’t be as effective, but this is not true. Bar soap
contains elements that effectively clean hands rather than hand soap.

I would definitely change the way I counted bacteria because it is a

bit unreliable. Sometimes there is human error because dead bacteria and
dirt look similar to bacteria. The dirt I used was also a little fishy because it
has too many other things in it like roots of old plants, bugs, wood chips,
sticks, and other larger dirt particles. I also could’ve thought of another way
to measure bacteria in a different way. There was a microscope connected
to a computer that enlarged the image which then allowed you to print off a
copy of what you saw in the microscope but the device was broken.

Overall, the experiment could’ve been better but the information

gained was I had envisioned from the start.