When you do the dishes and have a little residue of cheese attached to your fork that contrains you to pass a second time your sponge/dishwashing liquid to be perfectly clean.
If we applied this logic to microscopic things on our hands, that would mean that it’s better to clean them twice “just to be sure”. Since it’s impossible to know if we have particularly resistants microbes or something like that, one more soap/rince seems worth
Is this manner of thinking sounds accurate in a scientific way ?
In: Chemistry
Say we have a big plate, and it has a million dots on it. Each time we wash it, we remove 99% of what’s on the plate. After the first wash, we’ll have 10,000 dots left on it. After the second wash, we’ll remove 99% of that 10,000, leaving 100 dots. It’s unlikely you’ll ever get it perfectly clean, but it depends what you’re comfortable with. You could stop at two, but why not do three? Why not one hundred times? That can become a compulsion, which is bad for you. Ultimately, very very few things will ever be perfectly clean, but all we can do is work to an acceptable standard.
In hospitals, we have a set hand-washing routine in which you do lots of little steps repeatedly – palms together for 5 seconds, then around your thumbs for 5 seconds etc.. That’s to ensure we hit each part of our hand, and scrub it enough to clean as much as is practical.
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