One other ''practical'' study will be described here (Cliver and Kostenbader 1984) . The topic was disinfection of fingers contaminated with virus in feces. Many such studies have since been done (Ansari et al. 1988 (Ansari et al. , 1989 Bidawid et al. 2000 Bidawid et al. , 2004 Mbithi et al. 1992 Mbithi et al. , 1993 Sattar and Ansari 2002) . Our study was distinguished by the use of virus shed in feces in the course of infection, inclusion of a number of brand-name disinfectants, application of glass coverslips as a receiving surface, and evaluation of disposable plastic gloves as a virus barrier. Some of the fecal material came from pigs infected with a swine enterovirus; other samples came from a child shedding poliovirus after oral vaccination; all were frozen at -20°C until used experimentally. Fingers (principally those of the present author) of hands that had been thoroughly washed with soap and water were pressed lightly onto the fecal surface and, in baseline studies, touched to sterile glass coverslips. This permitted precise gravimetric determination of the quantity of fecal material deposited; food surfaces, faucet handles, bar soap, towels, etc. were also touched, but the feces were ultimately deposited on coverslips to allow quantification. Some of the experiments were performed on shaved swine skin as well. When the virus was recovered from the coverslip and assayed by the plaque technique, the weight determination enabled estimation of how much virus had been removed by cleansing and how much had probably been inactivated. A highly alkaline (pH 8.8) hand soap was found to be strongly antiviral, and a comparable alkaline buffer was found to be equally effective. In general, disinfectants that were well tolerated by human skin were relatively ineffective. Disposable plastic gloves were shown both to prevent contamination of clean fingers touching virus-containing feces and to prevent contamination of other surfaces contacted by fecally contaminated fingers.