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Please Wash Your Hands!

© Neal Rolfe Chamberlain

In an article titled, "America's Dirty Little Secret- Our Hands" it has been reported that while 95 percent of men and women surveyed say they wash their hands after using a public restroom, only 67 percent of people actually do wash their hands before leaving the restroom. This survey and observational study was conducted in 2000 by the American Society of Microbiology. Despite increased publicity over the past several years about the importance of hand washing in limiting the spread of infectious disease, men and women in several American cities are even less likely to wash today than they were four years ago.

This is distressing :( Hand washing is cheap and easy to perform. It is also the best way to prevent the spread of disease. However, for some reason the extra 20-30 seconds to wash our hands is too much for many people. Hand washing has a relatively short history. On May 15th, 1850 Ignaz Semmelweis addressed the Society of Physicians and described how hand washing between patients could lower the death rate of women following delivery of their babies from 18 percent to 2.5 percent. Unfortunately, even Dr. Semmelweis was not able to convince many physicians of this fact during his lifetime. For more information on the unsanitary practices and the deaths that resulted in hospitals before hand washing became common practice click here. It seems that even today in our "enlightened" times that a large number of people still don't wash their hands.

Washing our hands is a good thing and should be performed before, during, and after you prepare food, before you eat, after you use the bathroom, after handling animals or animal waste, when your hands are dirty, and more frequently when someone in your home is sick.

However, just rinsing your hands off with cold water is not very effective. To get clean hands you need to:

1. First wet your hands and apply liquid or clean bar soap. Place the bar soap on a rack and allow it to drain.
2. Next rub your hands vigorously together and scrub all surfaces.
3. Continue for 10 - 15 seconds or about the length of a little tune (singing the "Happy Birthday" song is helpful). It is the soap combined with the scrubbing action that helps dislodge and remove germs.
4. Rinse well and dry your hands

There is a ton of good information on the web on the merits of hand washing. Soap and water are cheap. There is no reason people can't wash their hands. In fact the new waterless cleansers available now can be used by people with no access to soap and water to prevent the spread of infections. Here