# Who uses hand sanitizer in the frog room



## *GREASER* (Apr 11, 2004)

For those of you who use this stuff do you know if it will burn the frogs skin if they come in contact with your hands after putting hand sanitizer on them? It seems to really linger.


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## Dancing frogs (Feb 20, 2004)

*GREASER* said:


> For those of you who use this stuff do you know if it will burn the frogs skin if they come in contact with your hands after putting hand sanitizer on them? It seems to really linger.


I think you answered you're own question.

Sanitizer=poison


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## *GREASER* (Apr 11, 2004)

Dancing frogs said:


> [quote="*GREASER*":2bhma14x]For those of you who use this stuff do you know if it will burn the frogs skin if they come in contact with your hands after putting hand sanitizer on them? It seems to really linger.


I think you answered you're own question.

Sanitizer=poison[/quote:2bhma14x]


but i do like it when im sticking my hand in a few tanks right after another. But if I want to handle my larger frogs I will just continue to wash my hands each time. I also try to use non scented soap at all times.


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## Julio (Oct 8, 2007)

the stuff doesn't really linger as much as you think, it is mostly alchohol based which drys rather fast, but i normall wait a minute or two before placing my hand in the tank due to the fumes so it doesn;t affect the frogs, why are you touching the frogs anyway?


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## Otis (Apr 16, 2006)

it will burn the frogs within ten seconds of you putting it on. i took a babysitting course and this was part of the curriculum. i would wait 20 though, just in case.


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## bbrock (May 20, 2004)

Julio said:


> the stuff doesn't really linger as much as you think, it is mostly alchohol based which drys rather fast, but i normall wait a minute or two before placing my hand in the tank due to the fumes so it doesn;t affect the frogs, why are you touching the frogs anyway?


Yes, but what about residue from the gel and moisturizer additives? I think I would wash and rinse my hands before actually handling a frog just to be safe. But I agree that hand sanitizer between vivs during maintenance is a good practice.


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## slaytonp (Nov 14, 2004)

Nothing beats hand washing with plain soap and water. This physically removes bacteria and whatever else you are concerned with transmitting. Hand "sanitizers" merely make everyone feel better and were invented for busy nurses in hospitals, as an excuse for not washing their hands between patients in the emergency room or elsewhere. The crisis with MRSA nosocomial infections in hospitals has proved that this is not an effective method of stopping its spread. 

Sorry, this has always been one of my sore points for years. I've spent many years in a secondary position of "infection control director" for a few rural hospitals, and have done many studies myself on this issue. An alcohol or antibiotic based sanitizer merely wiped on one's hands does not kill off Staphylococcus aureus, for instance. A plain soap and water scrub and rinse does, no matter what soap you use. My opinion is that hand sanitizers are a placebo and aren't worth their price.


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## kyle1745 (Feb 15, 2004)

Can't say it any better than that... 

I stick to soap and water as well.


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## Frogtofall (Feb 16, 2006)

Disposable latex gloves???


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## npaull (May 8, 2005)

> The crisis with MRSA nosocomial infections in hospitals has proved that this is not an effective method of stopping its spread.


Patty -

While I agree that alcohol gels are inferior to hand washing, do you have any references which show that Staph. aureus is specifically resistant to alcohol gels? I was not aware of this and would be surprised if it were true.

Organisms that can form spores (like some bacteria and some fungi) can be resistant to alcohol gels IF they have sporulated when the gel is applied. Staphylococcus, though, cannot form spores.


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## dom (Sep 23, 2007)

bbrock said:


> Julio said:
> 
> 
> > the stuff doesn't really linger as much as you think, it is mostly alchohol based which drys rather fast, but i normall wait a minute or two before placing my hand in the tank due to the fumes so it doesn;t affect the frogs, why are you touching the frogs anyway?
> ...



why dont you just rinse your hands off after you put the sanitzer on them .. but then again you could just wash your hands normal if you go thru all of that ! soap and water all the way! even tho i mostly deal with snakes right now i still wash soap and water before handling each one


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

npaull said:


> > The crisis with MRSA nosocomial infections in hospitals has proved that this is not an effective method of stopping its spread. [/quote
> >
> > While I agree that alcohol gels are inferior to hand washing, do you have any references which show that Staph. aureus is specifically resistant to alcohol gels? I was not aware of this and would be surprised if it were true.
> >
> > ...


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## slaytonp (Nov 14, 2004)

My statement that the alcohol gels are totally ineffective in the prevention of MRSA in hospitals was careless and incorrect, although some of those available for home use have only about a 33% alcohol content after dilution with lotions and scents, etc. and are not effective. I MEANT to say that they are not as effective as handwashing, as at 60% alcohol, the lowest effective concentration, it may still take several minutes to kill off Staph. They are much better than nothing, and HAVE been shown to reduce the spread of Staph in large hospitals where nurses are going from patient to patient without time for complete hand washing in between. This is provided that hands are clean to begin with, as dirt and accumulations of oils and sweat provide some protection for the organisms. The physical removal of bacteria washes it down the drain, while a short wipe will remove some, of course, but tend to smear it around, and does not get under fingernails. 

We did periodic hand cultures on blood agar from nursing staff, physicians and laboratory personnel at our own hospital as a part of an ongoing infection control education program--before and after hand washing, using pre-surgical scrub technique, before and after washing with plain warm water and before and after the use of a hand sanitizer. In the latter case, we had the nurses do a quick wipe, as closely emulating what they tended to do between patients on a busy day. (This simple method does not culture viruses, anaerobic spores or those that require CO2 or special media, so we were only evaluating easily cultured environmental bacteria and some fungi.) The results were of course, the surgical hand scrub usually removed 100% of the bacteria we were able to recover on blood agar. The plain water physical scrubbing was more effective than the alcohol based sanitizers alone. 

Most all of the bacteria we recovered were non-pathogens, as the protocol for handling potentially infectious material such as blood and body fluids or exudates always involved wearing gloves and discarding them, with hand washing both before and after use. These included various species of soil bacteria, Staphylococcus epidermidis, which is a normal skin flora (occasionally an opportunistic pathogen) and various unidentified fungi. 

We are usually not concerned with Staph in our tanks, but this organism simply represents a group of the non-sporulating bacteria that are relatively resistant to sanitizers and more difficult to remove than others. The MRSA is one of which the most sanitizer/hand washing studies have concentrated upon in hospital settings because it of serious concern.

Here are a couple of references with some interesting information. 

http://nytimes.com/2006/03/21/health/21cons.html
http://asm.org/Media/index.asp?bid=42983 Scroll down to Norovirus abstract.


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## npaull (May 8, 2005)

Thanks for the clarification, Patty. Makes sense.


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## bbrock (May 20, 2004)

sp1k3_420 said:


> why dont you just rinse your hands off after you put the sanitzer on them .. but then again you could just wash your hands normal if you go thru all of that ! soap and water all the way! even tho i mostly deal with snakes right now i still wash soap and water before handling each one


Patty beat me to a lot of this but what I was trying to suggest was that a good 20 second hand wash with thorough rinse would be best before actually handling an amphibian.

But I know good froggers who use hand sanitizer between vivs any time they open a viv (for feeding etc.). If you have a hundred tanks, and have to soap for 20 seconds and rinse between every tank, you will spend more than a half hour just washing your hands during a day's maintenance rounds. And your hands will probably not like it. A 60% alcohol sanitizer between viv openings does not seem like a bad compromise. But that is just to reduce transmission from casual/incidental contact with furniture in a viv. Again, I would stick with tried and true hand scrubbing before handling any amphibian.


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## slaytonp (Nov 14, 2004)

I pity any poster who just wants a simple answer to what he initially regards as a relatively simple question, and just gets the bunch of us arguing back and forth about the more esoteric aspects. This must truly be confusing, although the rest of us are certainly having a good time with it. (EdK needs to marry me in order to be totally miserable, albeit always right.) 

Here is my personal confession: I do not wash my hands between feeding frogs and going from one tank to the other to do so. My hands aren't in contact with any part of the tank while feeding and tapping flies out of a deli-cup, and they have not mauled the flies in any way between feedings. They are not in contact with anything that is going to reach the frogs, and never have been. The flies are tapped into the tank out of a deli-cup. There is no contamination possible from my hands and no contamination into the deli-cup from the tank to pass on to the next. One merely taps the food out from the edge. End of any pathogen transmission. Why wash your hands between tappings? No practical reason to do so at all. 

I only touch my frogs at all in emergency situations, such as a sudden escape, where I really don't have time to wash my hands before I pick it up, dirt, cat hair, rug stuff, and whatever else, rinse it off in warm water, and return it as fast as possible. Worst scenario-- The frog dies because I didn't find it soon enough. If it lives, it hasn't picked up any diseases from the forest of cat hair and rug stuff. 

When I revamp tanks, I do wash my hands beforehand, but then I really rip and trim without interim hand washings on the same tank project. I am introducing nothing new, but do wash my hands after wiping my butt, if that happens to be necessary in the interim. I'm not certain that failing to wash after wiping my butt would involve any froggie pathogens, but I do it anyway, just to be polite, and besides, my mother told me to, even after I pointed out to her that I wipe with toilet paper, not my bare hand. 

Opening a vivarium for feeding merely lets some fresh air in. I cannot imagine that the tapping in of some live critters off the edge of a deli cup or other means of dispersal would require sanitizing the hands of the tapper between tanks. How extensively neurotic can this kind of concern get?


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## Otis (Apr 16, 2006)

as long as we're all confessing, i don't either. if i do any maintnence, which i may also confess rarely happens, i will but not just to feed. i am pretty careful not to touch the tank when i feed so i don't think just opening the tank makes your hands dirty.


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## bbrock (May 20, 2004)

slaytonp said:


> Opening a vivarium for feeding merely lets some fresh air in. I cannot imagine that the tapping in of some live critters off the edge of a deli cup or other means of dispersal would require sanitizing the hands of the tapper between tanks. How extensively neurotic can this kind of concern get?


I don't think it is neurotic, but you have to understand the collections I'm talking about. But first my confession. I'm WAY worse than you. I move plants and stuff back and forth between vivs with barely a rinse in between. Why? Because I'm stupid. But also because I've had the same frogs for 10 years and only in the past year has anything new come into the house. I'm not saying this is smart (see reason number one) but I'm saying that my collection is small and stable enough that there is a very low chance of introducing any new pathogen into the mix. But everyone I know who sanitizes between tanks has learned the lesson the hard way. They have large collections, often rare animals. Lots of new stuff coming and going. And, most important, are not strangers to wild caught animals. I think most, if not all, of them had disease run through their collections shortly after bringing a new frog in (even though in quarantine) in their earlier days. Whole collections have actually been wiped out this way. So I think these guys have smartly adopted some pretty good sanitation procedures to minimize the possibility of repeating mistakes of the past. But these aren't your average, every day collections either. I should also add that it isn't merely tapping in food. Like many of us, feeding time is also inspection time so it might include pulling a leaf aside to visually inspect a frog. Lifting a dish of eggs, or other tasks that actually could put a hand in contact with something icky. And given that some of them may spend spend a couple hours a night tending the collection, hand washing between each viv isn't really practical. Again, not your average collections.


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## Dancing frogs (Feb 20, 2004)

I agree that washing hands between feedings is a little overboard (in most cases).

My regimen is as follows:
Wash hands before feeding.
Wash hands after feeding.
Wash hands before doing viv chores, which includes pruning and removing eggs, wash hands after each viv.

My hands are dry and cracked all the time as it is...most dermatolagists will say when you have that problem to "keep the soap off".


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## Jencylivez (May 31, 2007)

You gotta love patty! Shes super intelligent with a sense of humor to boot. If i had some more years on me I'd take you out on a date


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## dom (Sep 23, 2007)

Jencylivez said:


> You gotta love patty! Shes super intelligent with a sense of humor to boot. If i had some more years on me I'd take you out on a date




im 20.. hey patty wanna date! internet boyfriend come on!


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## Otis (Apr 16, 2006)

dancingfrogs- if your hands are really cracked try using lotion. goldbond is supposed to work pretty well. thats what ppl. at the zoo i volunteer at use cause they too are also washing their hands a lot.


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## Frogtofall (Feb 16, 2006)

Goldbond is useful for other areas too... :wink:

Edit: Well the powder is at least... :lol:


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

Patty, your going to make my wife jealous...  (she wanted to know what I was laughing about). 

If your hands are getting badly chapped then you can also use disposable gloves. Either use the powderless ones or rinse them off before reaching into a cage to prevent the frogs from being irritated by the powder. I wash my hands alot both at work and at home, but when they start getting that chapped I start using the gloves more to let my hands recover. 

Another item to consider is the order in which you care for the frogs. If you start with the animals you have had the longest, and work down towards the newest you can also significantly reduce the risk of pathogen transmission. 
I do this at work and animals known to be positive or in quarantine are the last animals taken care of in a routine. 

Ed


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## slaytonp (Nov 14, 2004)

(I am shouting here Hey Greaser, where did you go? Look what you did-- made Ed's wife jealous, then just butted out of the conversation while we took it to all extremes possible. Did you lose interest along the way or what? What did you want to know anyway? Did we ever give you an answer? 

Seriously, I do think we've done the ultimate bit on this topic. We took it to the stars and back from different situations and experiences and blew it into an octupus with tentacles. I personally had a lot of fun.


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## frogfreak (Mar 4, 2009)

We find nitrile disposable gloves are great. You can buy a box of a hundred at lowes for $10.00. Beats all this hand washing.


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

Due to some recent information, I would suggest reconsidering using gloves in enclosures that contain tadpoles

see http://www.parcplace.org/Cashins_etal_2008_glovesandtads .pdf

Ed


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## ChrisK (Oct 28, 2008)

Ed said:


> Due to some recent information, I would suggest reconsidering using gloves in enclosures that contain tadpoles
> 
> see http://www.parcplace.org/Cashins_etal_2008_glovesandtads .pdf
> 
> Ed


I guess those coco fiber panels that are made with latex fit into that category too? And does anyone know what's used to hold tree fern panels together?


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

Can't say about the coco fiber panels. 

The tree fern panels are grown that way.... 

Ed


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## ChrisK (Oct 28, 2008)

"squares of coco fiber that are tightly woven and covered with latex for longer life."

That statement is enough for me to not use them in tanks I was hoping frogs to breed in I guess


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## frogfreak (Mar 4, 2009)

Thanks for the info Ed. I guess I'm going out to buy some gold bond. 

Glenn & Laura


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