Press Room
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung refers in one issue to an enlightening study by a US university:
"It doesn't even take a whole morning for a test virus to spread from a centrally located door handle in an office building, hotel or hospital across the entire facility. After only two to four hours, forty to sixty percent of employees and visitors and forty to sixty percent of items frequently used by many people, such as banisters, taps, light switches and coffee machines, are contaminated. Charles Gerba of the University of Arizona in Tucson has presented these sobering figures at the .......... Interscience Conference on Antimicrobiol Agents and Chemotherapy in Washington. If, on the other hand, everyone washes their hands regularly and all critical items are cleaned with a suitable disinfectant at least once a day, the number of contaminated samples is reduced by eighty percent. The amount of virus that can be detected in the contaminated samples is reduced by 99 percent. Gerba and his colleagues used a test virus similar to Norovirus for this demonstration. Noroviruses cause severe stomach and intestinal diseases. Less than one hundred virus particles are sufficient for an infection. Noroviruses mainly threaten people in hospitals, old people's and nursing homes and kindergartens. The Robert Koch Institute was notified of over half a million confirmed norovirus infections in 2009 and 2013. The number of unreported cases is considerably higher. "Our results leave no doubt that public consumer goods are contaminated very quickly," Gerba said in a press release. "But they also show that there are simple measures to reduce contact with the viruses." Gerba is anyway of the opinion that good hygiene has so far prevented more infectious diseases than all vaccinations and antibiotic treatments combined."
Translated by www.DeepL.com/Translator
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