Support for Recommendations of Precleaning Before Disinfection: Limited Efficacy of Soapy Water as a Disinfectant against SARS-CoV-2
Publication: Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 148, Issue 11
Abstract
The World Health Organization (WHO) and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend cleaning soiled surfaces with soap and water, followed by use of approved disinfectant. However, data are lacking on the potential efficacy of soapy water alone as a disinfectant for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which is relevant to low-resource settings where soapy water is prevalent for handwashing. To our knowledge, no appropriate biosafety level 1 (BSL-1) surrogate has been identified and confirmed for use in studies with soapy water and the highly infectious SARS-CoV-2. Therefore, our objectives were to determine the efficacy of soapy water alone as a disinfectant against SARS-CoV-2 and if commonly used BSL-1 bacteriophage surrogates could serve as a surrogate model for testing soapy water as a disinfectant. Overall, results indicate that SARS-CoV-2 can be reduced in suspension but only on a nonporous surface with 10 min of exposure to 0.5% soapy water. This difference is potentially attributed to less area of exposure on surfaces than in suspension. Phi6 (a verified SARS-CoV-2 surrogate for other disinfectants) was not appropriate for SARS-CoV-2 disinfection with soapy water. Further research is needed to determine an appropriate surrogate for SARS-CoV-2 disinfection with soapy water as disinfection of MS2 was similar to SARS-CoV-2 on surfaces only. Our work highlights the importance of confirming surrogates for each disinfectant used. Based on our results, we do not recommend a change to the current WHO and CDC surface disinfection protocols that recommend using soapy water to preclean a surface before applying disinfectant.
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Data Availability Statement
All data, models, and code generated or used during the study appear in the published paper.
Acknowledgments
This study is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents are the responsibility of the coauthors and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government. We thank CDC’s Principal Investigator Natalie Thornburg and the World Reference Center for Emerging Viruses and Arboviruses (WRCEVA) for sharing SARS-CoV-2 and Prof. Sylvain Moineau of the University of Laval for Phi6. We are grateful to Christine Kelley for laboratory assistance at Lancon Environmental, LLC; Adam Hume and Judith Olejnik for BSL-4 laboratory assistance at the NEIDL at Boston University; and Mike Eubanks for making the surface carriers.
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© 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Feb 9, 2022
Accepted: Jul 11, 2022
Published online: Aug 26, 2022
Published in print: Nov 1, 2022
Discussion open until: Jan 26, 2023
ASCE Technical Topics:
- Bacteria
- Business management
- Diseases
- Engineering fundamentals
- Environmental engineering
- Federal government
- Geomechanics
- Geotechnical engineering
- Government
- Health hazards
- Methodology (by type)
- Organizations
- Pollutants
- Practice and Profession
- Public administration
- Public health and safety
- Research methods (by type)
- Soil mechanics
- Soil properties
- Soil water
- Verification
- Water and water resources
- Water management
- Water supply
- Water treatment
- Water use
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