After we went through the initial process, and incubated at 30 C, we had very clear results. I observed that the Stridex killed off the most e-coli and that the other 2 products did very little damage. There was very little calculations needed for this lab, all of them were easily done by hand. The design of this experiment was fairly good, although there was a lot of room for error. For example, if someone didn't rub the e-coli onto their dish in the right pattern, some of the quadrants could have received less of the e-coli than the others, thus making the results misleading. Also, someone could have forgotten to sterilize his or her loop, or have done a poor job collecting the e-coli from the master dish. Any of these things could have affected the results of lab. The way that the products were chosen also could have been changed. For example, if the whole class has used the same 3 products, then the results could be seen clearly, and how much certain errors really affected the data would be much more apparent. From our results, the Stridex did the best job killing of the e-coli. The Stridex was a foaming hand sanitizer. The Palmolive, which is an oral cleaner, might have been better at killing just oral bacteria, and was not as fit to kill e-coli as the foaming Stridex was. The Fantastik was an all-purpose cleaner for tabletops and dishes, but did not have nearly have as good as an affect on the e-coli as the foaming Stridex. In conclusion, the foaming Stridex was best for killing off the e-coli, maybe it had something to do with the foaming action, or that it was made for killing bacteria on the skin. .
