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Are your hands clean? Pollen retention on the human hand after washing
#MMPMID32834132
Hunt CO
; Morawska Z
Rev Palaeobot Palynol
2020[Sep]; 280
(?): 104278
PMID32834132
show ga
Pollen retention on clothes, footwear, hair and body has been used to link people
to localities with distinctive vegetation, or soils containing distinctive
palynomorphs. Little attention has been given to human skin as a possible medium
for carrying a forensically important pollen load and whether this might survive
attempts to remove it. We report here the results of experiments testing the
retention of pollen of 10 flowering plant species on the human skin through
repeated cycles of washing and drying hands, using the WHO protocol to
standardize hand-washing and drying. Between 0.36% and 2.74% (mean 0.93%) of the
initial pollen load was retained through a single hand-wash. Trace amounts of
some species survived multiple hand-wash cycles. It is concluded that forensic
analyses can be made of the pollen load of those parts of the skin that may have
been in contact with palynologically distinctive vegetation, even in cases where
the person involved has washed, or been washed. These observations may also be of
relevance in cases where human skin became contaminated with other microscopic
particulates.
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