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SCIENCE ALIVE! - Is It Clean

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Petri dish observation on bacterial growth swabbed from surfaces around our workplace to show the importance of frequent proper hand-washing.

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Good morning and welcome to Region 20, Living Science. My name is Charlotte Tondre and I have with me, I'm Mercedes Marin. The two of us work in Living Science, preparing materials to send out to your class room. This is our first ZOOM session and I wanted to mention some upcoming ones. This one is "Is It Clean?" and in 2 weeks, on September 22nd we are doing "Rodent Roundup", we're going to go through the stages of rodents from birth to until they're weaned. Then on October 8th is going to be "Furry Friends" which has to do with tarantulas, which is a good time because October is Halloween. On October 20th, "Grow Seed, Grow!" which will introduce our grow kits, seeds and plants. Then on November 12th we're going to cover the trunk, Talk Turkey. "Turkey Talk" is the name of the session. December 10th is going to be the trunk of Adaptations and it is titled "Adaptable Me". All of these sessions will be recorded and put on the ESC 20, Living Science home page for future use. You can check them out and watch them whenever you have the time. It's going to be a video library and then today's topic is "Is It Clean" and we are going to observe bacteria growth swabbed from surfaces around the workplace. So we have, in this section, we have where we swapped a door handle. Door handles common used items, everybody touches them and you can also see there's bacteria and there's a little bit of fungus growing on here. The fuzzy stuff is the fungus, so there's a little bit of fungus on there and a lot of bacteria. All of these were swabbed on September 1st, so this is the growth of that many days and we are at the 10th so it's been 9 days. Another one, the commonly used we don't think about, this is a cell phone and just the face of the cell phone with swabbed and it is covered in the agar plate. Just all the bacterias that come off the side of your face, just touching because you swipe. There's bacteria from everywhere. You lay it down, no matter where you lay it, you pick it up again. So the surface you lay it on even has bacteria on it and picks it up again. This one was the water handles at the sink, because everyone uses it to wash their hands. Again it's bacteria with a little bit of fungus, not too much, but mostly bacteria. Again, they're common touched, everything's touched at that point. What did these petri dishes look like before you swabbed them? Okay, I have a blank petri dish here. This is nutrient agar and they are poured here at Region 20. I just took a common Q-tip, I swabbed my surface, we'll just go to the cell phone, and then I just brushed it across the agar like so, then put the dish the lid back on it and set it off to the side and within 3 days you should see bacteria growing. Keep it in just a dry place. I had mine on a shelf in my office and after three days we got bacteria. Are these available?  These are available, Region 20 has them and we send them out in stacks out 10. you can break them down for however how many you need. We also have bacterias that you can swab and put in these and watched certain bacteria grow. Our bacteria are labeled so you'll know which ones you're getting and as these we don't really know what they are, but you can-- You can see similarities in some of them. Correct, correct. So if you grow your own and then you swap bacteria, you might be able to say, "Oh, that's a certain type" because I know certain ones are certain colors, like lutea's are the yellow. I know that much. Now what do we have over here? Okay, these are dishes from where we clean, actually we didn't clean. This is from dirty hands before we even washed and you see fungus and all the bacteria in there and if you looked at there's a coating on the surface because the bacteria has taken over. The dish itself was actually as clear as this one and now it has like a milky, so there's bacteria covering the whole the whole dish. So that's just dirty hands all together. This one is from using hand sanitizer and again the bacteria has covered everywhere and these two were started on September 1st. So again, they're 9 -10 days old and you figure how many things you touch just within one day and all of this bacteria and if you don't go wash your hands, you pass a sink, you're going to share this with everybody. This one was washing the hands for 20 seconds. It doesn't get all the bacteria off, but it does help to get rid of most of it and again there's a type of lutea right there. We do have bacteria slants and petri dishes so if you want to do an experiment with the bacteria or you can order the Petri dishes and let the students swab things around the classroom, things around their home and let the bacteria grow and see how gross things are, because they are gross. Why did you decide the topic for this session? We thought with everything going on right now, with COVID and how important it is to wash hands, we were just showing everyone how the bacterias grow, how they spread and just from three or four people touching things and not washing your hands. It is important that you wash your hands every 30 minutes to an hour, because you just walk around and you touch, without even thinking about it, you just go by and pick up a pencil. You really do not know who had that pencil before. So just keep your hands clean. If you do not have access to soap and water right away, hand sanitizer is good, but once you get to a sink use soap and water. It is very important that you wash your hands for 20 seconds under warm water. It is very important and dry them well. It's always advised to scrub underneath your fingernails too and in between your fingers and again, use paper towels to dry. Hand-drying utilities are good, but they do spread the bacteria around the air. I personally think using paper towels is better. Mercedes has a little experiment to do- So what we have here is just plain water and we had put some pepper in the water. This experiment is going to show why it's important to use soap when washing your hands. We're just using plain water, can we just put some pepper in the water. Now I'm going to start my experience. On this finger right here, there is no soap on my finger whatsoever. It's just a dry plain, dirty finger and I'm going to stick my finger inside the pepper. You can see that all the pepper is getting onto my finger. This pepper is just a representation of germs and how germs are attracted to my dirty finger. That's really gross. On this one, we're going to out a little bit of soap on it. Rub it around and see what happens when I put my finger in the pepper now. You see how all the pepper dispersed away from my finger? There is absolutely no germs or pepper on my finger. There's just a reaction that soap has, very good properties, to repel germs. How can you create this project? So you can create this project at home. You can get any type of washing bowl or soup bowl and just pour some water into it. We advise you use pepper. Common household, edible pepper. You can get it at any type of grocery store or even the dollar store and any soap. Liquid soap works best for this experiment but any soap can be used. So let's walk over to the sink and let's practice a good hand-washing technique, since Mercedes needs to get these germs off her fingers. Turn on the hot water. Wait for it to get a little hot. Okay, that's about good now. I'm take just little bit of soap, you don't need a lot, just enough to get a good lather going. Rinse your hands and start lathering up the soap. Getting in between the fingers. On the palms, on the tops of the hands and the wrists. Like I said before, it's good to go underneath the nails because you do get a lot of dirt and germs underneath your nails. Another way to make sure that you're washing for 20 seconds is to sing the "Happy Birthday" song 2 times. Always rinse with warm water. I like to dry my hands before I turn off the sink I use another paper towel to turn off the faucet. All done! I hope everyone enjoyed this lesson today. We are looking forward to doing more of these and if you watch this video in the future and if you have any suggestions on future program, please email us at livingscience@esc20.net If you have any questions regarding our resources you can also reach us at the same email address or you can reach us at 210-370-5688 That is the living science department and anyone that answers will be able to assist you. Thank you and we look forward to seeing you again!

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