Is soap really self-cleansing?

It's an old joke really -- soap, being soap, never gets dirty right? Or does it? The Dial Corporation Technical Center recently did a test to answer the question definitively and found out that the risk of contamination from a bar of soap is basically nil. Even when bars of soap were inoculated with bacterias E. coli and P. aeruginosa at drastically high levels, participants who used the soap didn't have detectable levels of bacteria on their hands after they were done washing them. So there you go...another one of life's mysteries solved!