Progress in developing a virus hand test

Hygienic hand disinfection is one of the most important measures to prevent viral infections in hospitals and other medical facilities. Guidelines strictly emphasize the urgent need of hand hygiene procedures with alcohol-based hand rubs. Its application requires products with a proven efficacy against model viruses evaluated in a quantitative suspension test and/or on artificial contaminated finger pads (ASTM 1838-10) or the entire hand (ASTM 2011-09). Unfortunately, both ASTM methods do not follow the clinical practice in hospitals and other medical facilities.So far there is no method available in Europe to determine the antiviral efficacy on contaminated hands. Nowadays, efforts by the CEN committee (virus task group) are undertaken to develop a method which resembles both contamination and hand treatment in clinical practice as closely as possible. In the WI (work item) 00216088 the recent developments are described.The murine norovirus (MNV) is chosen as test virus. The finger pads (including the thumb) are inoculated in 0.5 ml of the contamination fluid (murine norovirus suspension) in 12 or 24 well plates for 15 s. Then surplus liquid is carefully allowed to drain back into the container for a maximum of 30 s. Fingers are dried under the safety cabinet for 3 min.For hand hygiene 3 ml of the hand disinfectant are poured into the cupped dry hands and rubbed vigorously for 30 seconds onto the skin up to the wrists in accordance with the standard hand rub (EN 1500) procedure to ensure total coverage of the hands.Immediately at the end sampling from each fingertip (including the thumb) is started with 1 ml sample fluid per finger. Therefore, each fingertip is rubbed for 1 min on the base of a small Petri dish with 1 ml cell culture medium. Finally, the titer of residual virus is determined.The virus lab of Dr. Brill + Partner in Bremen is involved in the still running ring trials in Europe since the beginning together with 2 other labs in Europe and one lab in the United States. Recently, studies were performed in these 4 labs to find out the reference testing different concentrations of ethanol.Studies are still on-going for developing the European test method for evaluating the virus inactivation on artificially contaminated hand. Dr. Brill + Partner GmbH will continuously participate in these studies. A previous study done in our lab in Bremen independently from these European efforts has been published in 2012 demonstrating the large competence in this field.J. Steinmann, D. Paulmann, B. Becker, B. Bischoff, E. Steinmann, J. Steinmann: Comparison of virucidal activity of alcohol-based hand sanitizers versus antimicrobial hand soaps in vitro and in vivo.  J Hosp Infect (82): 277-280 (2012)If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.