My-Shield Hand Sanitizer Testing

Does My-Shield hand sanitizer do a good job killing bacteria on my kid's hands? Yes!

About My-Shield Hand Sanitizer 

My-Shield Hand Sanitizer kills the norovirus surrogate murine norovirus AND is the FIRST hand sanitizer that I have ever heard of that kills C. Diff SPORES!!!! Clostridium difficile is a bacteria that causes a horrible intestinal infection that can last for months or years. It is very common in hospitals. If you are on an antibiotic such as clindamycin and step foot into a hospital for any procedure, you are at risk for getting c.diff. (I am not a medical doctor and there are other risk factors for contracting C. diff.) My very healthy 16 year old nephew was on clindamycin and went into the hospital for a few hours for a minor surgical procedure and caught c.diff. He was sick for 1 year. C. diff forms spores that are extremely hard to kill. Most cleaning products won't kill C. diff spores except chlorine bleach. My-shield hand sanitizer has actually been tested and shown to kill 99.99% of C. diff spores in 10 minutes. Here is the C. diff test data that the company sent me. Yes, 10 minutes is kind of long but far better than nothing. If you work at a hospital, you could put it on when you leave and the vast majority of the spores and norovirus should be dead by the time you get home. (Wash your hands when you get home anyway.) This hand sanitizer is fragrance-free, contains no alcohol, and is very gentle on hands. It is a foam composed of four quaternary ammonium compounds (benzalkonium chloride, trimethyoxyl silyl propyl, trihydroxyl silyl ammonia, and polyamino biguanide). I know that there are dozens of hand sanitizers with benzalkonium chloride as the active ingredient. Benzalkonium chloride does not kill norovirus good enough by itself to be a useful hand sanitizer. However, when combined with the other quats, the my-shield does a great job. Here is the norovirus surrogate test data that the company gave me.  The My-Shield is also advertised to continue to work for several hours after application. I don't rely on that for any hand sanitizer that advertises that. It is always best to wash hands or reapply before eating if you can. Here is the company brochure about it. You can order the my-shield on Amazon in either a 4-pack of small pocket/purse sized 1.7 ounce bottles or a larger 7-ounce bottle. 



My-Shield hand sanitizer testing

In order to test my-shield,  I used my children's dirty hands. These were VERY dirty hands. 

First, the kids rubbed their dirty right hand all over an agar plate. Only their fingers really made contact with the plate. 

Then I put 3 pumps of my-shield foam hand sanitizer onto Jon's left hand and 2 pumps onto Michael's littler left hand. I rubbed the hand sanitizer in and let it sit for 1 minute.


Then the kids rubbed their sanitized left hand onto another agar plate. 



The plates were incubated for 48 hours in my warm (about 90 degrees F) incubator. 

My-Shield Results

In case you are new to looking at agar plates, let me explain. The whitish/yellowish dots are colonies (or piles) of millions of bacteria.  Viruses do not grow on these plates. Fungus and mold can grow on these plates. Not all types of bacteria can grow on these plates. So, just because a plate looks clean, doesn't necessarily mean that no microorganisms whatsoever were present. I also don't know what kinds of bacteria these are and whether or not they are dangerous. These experiments are still useful to compare the effectiveness of different hand sanitizers and cleaning products. If you would like to do your own experiments with agar plates, these are the agar plates that I use. 






As you can see, the my-shield hand sanitizer did a great job killing bacteria on the hands even though they had a lot of actual dirt on them. 


I repeated the experiment on a different day, but this time I rinsed the hand sanitizer off after 1 minute. I realize that no one is going to be rinsing hand sanitizer off in real life. However, I wanted to see what the hand sanitizer did after only 1 minute. I wanted to be sure the clean agar plates were not the result of extra hand sanitizer being rubbed onto the plate and incubating with the bacteria for 48 hours. This time the kids' hands were normal looking and not filthy. 


First, I rinsed my kids' "dirty" left hands under cool water for 10 seconds, and then they rubbed their dirty, wet, left hand onto an agar plate. Then I applied 2 pumps of hand sanitizer to their right hands and rubbed it in. They sat for 1 minute and then I rinsed their right hand for 10 seconds under cool water to remove extra hand sanitizer. Then they rubbed their wet right hand onto another agar plate. The plates were incubated for 48 hours. 



As you can see, the hand sanitizer seemed to still work really well even though it was rinsed off after a minute. My-Shield is supposed to stay on through a few hand washings, so it probably wasn't actually removed by that 10 second rinse. However, I just wanted to rinse extra hand sanitizer off to make sure it didn't end up on the agar plat with the bacteria. 

If you would like to try my-shield hand sanitizer because it has been shown to kill a norovirus surrogate, kills c. diff spores, does well in my on my kids' hands, and is gentler on skin than alcohol hand sanitizers, you can order it on Amazon in either a 4-pack of small pocket/purse sized 1.7 ounce bottles or a larger 7-ounce bottle.