Hand sanitizers are proven effective against bacteria, but very few studies show them effective against viruses. Personally I will not use them in the schools where I am tuning practice room pianos; they offer false security and there are better ways. I will avoid touching my face, especially my eyes and nose, until I have washed my hands well. The other strategy that I use in schools during the flu season is to wash the piano keys before I tune. Whether you use Cory Key Brite or just good old H2O, it will help. A clean plastic surface is a place where viruses cannot live for more than a half a minute or so. You do not need to directly kill them with alcohol or something else that can ruin the keys or weaken their glue joint. I clean the keys with Key Brite, get ready to tune and by the time the top is open and mutes and other equipment is in place, there is not much in the way of viruses left to worry about. One more warning: to be effective "they" recommend hand sanitizers to be at least 60% alcohol. If you put it on your hands and then light up a cigarette or go to burn some hammer shanks, you may see your hands on fire! Another less advertised way of avoiding getting sick with any flu is drinking hot beverages often. It seems this will flush the viruses from your throat and nasal passages down to your stomach where they will not get you sick. Chicken soup or coffee will do just fine, so go ahead, have another cup. Bruce Dornfeld, RPT bdornfeld at earthlink.net North Shore Chapter -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20091103/c7541f3a/attachment.htm>
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