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Clean hands
Dirty hands
A recent survey by the Food and Drink Federation (FDF) suggests that nearly 50% of teenagers don’t always wash their hands after using the toilet or before eating food. Forty percent of the 500 surveyed said they don’t always use soap, and about three-quarters of them dried their hands on their clothes. Were they 500 particularly dirty teens – or does that sound like you?

Have you ever wondered how clean your hands are after one wash?
 
You might like to …

  • Investigate how many washes it takes to get your hands really clean. You could place unwashed hands on an agar plate, seal it, then repeat the procedure after one wash, two washes etc. Compare them after they’ve been incubated for 48 hours
  • Compare the effectiveness of different soaps and detergents
  • See how dirty your hands become during the course of a day.
  • Investigate how a disease might spread by tracking the spread of a dye from person to person (see ); does the number of people ‘infected’ follow a mathematical pattern? Can you predict how many people would be ‘infected’ if the experiment continued? 
  • Investigate how outbreaks of real diseases are predicted?