Students Touch Bread Slices With Washed and Unwashed Hands. A Month Later, Here’s What the Bread Looks Like
Kitchen countertops, door knobs, library books, hotel room keys, school desks - everything we touch, everything we come in contact with is infested with germs. Until the hands are scrubbed and washed clean with disinfectant soap and lots of water, these germs carry the ability to trigger deadly sicknesses. Statistics say that about 1.8 million children die or fall deathly sick because of not washing their hands. So when the Idaho-based elementary school teacher, Dayna Robertson, wanted to instill the handwashing habit in her students, she came up with a creative idea, reported TODAY. To train her special education students at Discovery Elementary School in Idaho Falls, Robertson teamed up with behavior specialist, Jaralee Metcalf.
Together, they conducted a month-long experiment. But instead of glue-taping the typical “wash your hands” posters or charts with gecko germ graphics on her classroom walls, she utilized a household item: bread. “We took fresh bread and touched it. We did one slice untouched. One with unwashed hands. One with hand sanitizer. One with washed hands with warm water and soap. Then we decided to rub a piece on all our classroom Chromebooks,” Metcalf described in a December 2019 Facebook post. She added that the results were shocking given that all the school's Google Chromebooks were regularly cleaned and sanitized.
She also shared pictures of the bread slices placed in ziplock bags with five sticky notes, each reading one of the five categories of washed or unwashed hands. These results came about a month later after the experiment was carried out. In contrast to the slice that was fresh and untouched, the slice rubbed on the Google Chromebooks was smeared in sooty black mold. The slice touched with hands washed with soap and water was slightly cleaner than the slice touched with dirty hands.
“We chose this experiment for our science class because we had been learning about decaying leaves and toxic mold and flu season was approaching,” Metcalf told Bored Panda. “We decided it would be a cool experiment to learn about germs by using moldy white bread!” She said the students were very willing and involved in the experiment. But they thought it was disgusting and gross. "The students all thought it was gross," Robertson told TODAY. "They have really turned their hand-washing around (since the experiment). They realized that sanitizer doesn't cut it, and they've got to do soap and water."
Metcalf emphasized that when kids don’t wash their hands, it doesn’t just take a toll on their health but also on the health of teachers who come in contact. "As somebody who is sick and tired of being sick and tired of being sick and tired. Wash your hands!" Metcalf wrote on Facebook. "Remind your kids to wash their hands! And hand sanitizer is not an alternative to washing hands!! At all! This is so disgusting!" Over 10,000 people commented on her post saying the stuff is “gross,” “yuk,” and “nasty.” Others pointed out how hand sanitizer is not an efficient way to kill germs as it ends up destroying the good germs too. Meanwhile, teachers shared that they would like to repeat this experiment in their classrooms.