The Nuance
Are Antibacterial Soaps More Effective Than Regular Soap?
What you need to know about the germ-blocking abilities of products labeled antibacterial
Even during a typical cold-and-flu season, public health officials bang the drum about the importance of proper hand-washing technique. And in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the nitty-gritty elements of hand hygiene have taken on an added layer of life-and-death significance.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) puts thorough hand-cleaning at the top of its list of helpful measures that everyone should take to slow the spread of Covid-19. But the CDC does not specify the type of soap people should use. Those concerned consumers who go shopping for soap may wonder whether products labeled “antibacterial” offer virus-blocking abilities above and beyond plain-old soap.
“We don’t know, is the short answer,” says Donald Schaffner, a microbiologist and distinguished professor at the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences.
When applied to soap, the term “antibacterial” is a little misleading. An antibacterial soap contains one or more ingredients deemed by federal regulators to have antiseptic properties, which means the ingredient in question has…
