Tired of being told to wash your hands? Here's why it's so important.
Hand hygiene means keeping our hands clean by washing with plain or antimicrobial soap and water or by using an alcohol-based hand sanitiser.
This is one of the simplest and most effective ways to prevent the spread of infections from one person to another in hospitals and in a community.
Easy transfer
Consider this: As many as 14 people in a row can catch infections just by touching a door handle. We use our hands while doing most of our work. Thereby they pick up germs easily and become the easiest medium of transferring viral, bacterial or fungal infections. This is more so in an office environment where we share things like telephones, copying machines and door handles.
Common cold, influenza (including H1N1), chicken pox, mumps, food-poisoning, respiratory infections and skin infections are some of the diseases that can be unwittingly transmitted by just a handshake.
Make sure your hands are washed after you use a bathroom (whether at home or a public one), after you change a baby's diaper, before you feed a child, before your eat and before you start cooking or handle raw meat, fish, or poultry.
Use hand sanitisers after you have touched surfaces in public places, handled waste, touched your body parts, blown your nose, visited someone in a hospital or touched anything potentially infectious. These are more effective and easier to use than soap and water. However, if our hands are visibly dirty, before eating food and after visiting the toilet we must wash our hands.
Keywords: hand hygiene, hand sanitiser, contagious disease
Not that I am against hygiene but too much obsession with cleanliness could lead to reduced immunity to germs. If you wash your hands too many times you not only kill the useful good microbes but also damage your skin which is the first wall of defense against infection.
What about currency notes ? How to avoid them ? They are too dirty to be
touched but still we keep them in in our pockets. Notes carry all kinds
of viruses. Even sanitiser cannot clear the dirt from hands. Utensils or
any other article can be washed before use. Currency notes ?
Not long ago there was a stupid ad (another in the long list of indian tv ads) that
showed a child poking fun at one of her friends for taking time to wash his hands for
almost a minute which is in fact the right thing to do and should be encouraged
rather than wash for 10 secs as the ad claimed.
In India we cannot change peoples habits of digging their nose, sneezing into their
cupped hands, blatantly scratching genitals and anal region. The best solution is to
make sure you use hand sanitises as frequently as possible.
Hand hygiene is such simple yet effective method to limit spread of infection, but
people think they know better. Philip Ignatius Semmelweis a Hungarian doctor in the
19th Century was the first to note the importance of hand hygiene when he observed
an increase in maternal mortality from puerperal sepsis when his colleagues
conducted maternal deliveries after having conducted post mortems. He was
ridiculed in public and died a mad man.
Break the chain of infection-is a must to read article,especially in our community only a few are aware about the infections caused by the microbes .Especially people traveling in public transport should wash their hands properly so as to avoid infections ,otherwise they will become the frequent victims of common infections like common cold,dysentery etc .the hygiene should be taught from the pre school level itself.This is the reason why the infectious diseases are comparatively less in the developed countries.
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