Our least expensive health tool... hand washing

The lack of potable water around the world is the cause of much human misery, but the water shortgage contributes to illness and disease for other reasons as well. According to P & G Beauty Science, an entity owned by Proctor & Gamble, the health of the children of this world could be greatly improved if children in school washed their hands with soap and water. Absenteeism and illness are then reduced for the obvious reason that clean hands spread less disease. An interesting study documenting the benefit of a hand-washing program was performed in China and here is the link: http://www.pgbeautyscience.com/effects-of-a-hand-washing-promotion-program.html

Those familiar with hospital practices have known this for generations, but hand-washing remains an issue and any teaching hospital will tell you bad practices have become entrenched. Workers today are so hard-pressed to provide quick medical care and are in charge of so many patients' that hand-washing can fall by the wayside. Attempts to address this problem and also make it easier on caregivers have led to efforts to install anti-bacterial gels outside patient rooms.

Although the gels are an improvement, they should not replace hand-washing. Why? A recent article on a norovirus by Gather writer Donald H. warned of an epidemic that has been sweeping across England. http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977222372&nav=Namespace

Donald's article noted that the alcohol-based hand gels - now outside patient's rooms in most hospitals - do not kill this infectious critter. Bleach, the tried and true does, and in combination with hand-washing they would be a practical, effective control.

Of course, the gels are better than nothing, but my question is this. Why not both? Doesn't it make the most sense to wash hands well with soap and water in between rooms and procedures and then use the gels as a secondary source of infection protection?

The media loves to scare us with stories of the very real super-bugs which have developed and are generally spread in hospitals, but nobody seems to want to blame us for the real issue. Multiple-resistant bacterias are a man-made creation. Rather than prevent transmission at the source - mostly hospitals, although some have now escaped into the community - which would require great sums of money and effort to create sterile environments, we pretend we are creating a sterile environment.

Staying in a hospital is an easy way to get pneumonia and a host of other infections, but having an operation in a hospital is certainly the most probable way to catch a staph infection. Scarily, we all carry germs in our noses, as do the noses of all medical workers. This is one of the most pressing reasons to up the hygiene in all public places. Although our lovely bleached white teeth won't show, I still think nose and mouth masks should be required of all hospital workers, not just dentists and their hygienists.

Call me old-fashioned, but these are places where sick people are supposed to get better, not sicker. With the strangle-hold on insurance benefits, most hospitals house only the very, very sick these days, so this has upped the contagion factor even more.

Simple hand washing is such an effective method of cutting down the spread of infection that it should be everybody's number one activity before and after dealing with the public. After all, nobody wants to get sick and certainly nobody likes to bring home those bugs to kids and old people.

Of course the politicians figure this stuff out way before the common man or woman. There is so much anti-bacterial gel being slathered on the hands of everybody from George Bush to Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, that I am surprised Iowa, New Hampshire and D.C. haven't slid into the ocean by now. (Okay, so Iowa might really be a stretch on that one.:)

By the way, the next time Bush jumps the pond and visits the United Kingdom, or one of their politicians comes here, who will volunteer to tell him about the bleach? Oh come on, it was just a tasteless joke.:)