A Brief History
On October 15, 2017, people all across the world celebrate Global Handwashing Day, a day to encourage sanitary hand washing behavior in an effort to cut respiratory (notably pneumonia) and diarrheal diseases. Getting people to wash their hands as prescribed can save an estimate half million lives of children per year, and of course, reducing the amount of people with diarrhea by 30+% is darn near worth the effort alone!
Digging Deeper
Global Handwashing Day was started in 2008 by a consortium of producers of soap products and medical associations. The Public Private Partnership for Handwashing initiated the “holiday” at the annual World Water Week, which was held in Stockholm, Sweden. The United Nations appointed the date of October 15 for Global Handwashing Day (GHD) as part of the International Year of Sanitation (2008).
The aim of instituting a day specifically for handwashing is to call attention to the practices in various countries, where people do or do not wash their hands regularly. Plus, a major point of the effort is to get people to use soap when washing their hands, a practice proven to be far more effective at removing germs than merely rinsing in water. Education of children is obviously a major goal, and specific targets such as the Ebola epidemic have been aimed at.
The handwashing practice most strongly recommended is to wash your hands before eating or preparing food, and wash your hands after using the toilet. No mention of using hand sanitizer is made, but using such a product would almost assuredly accomplish the same goal as washing with soap and water, especially when using soap and water is not practical.
The Royal Pharmaceutical Society recommends washing briskly with soap and water for 20 seconds, and by singing the “Happy Birthday to You” song twice you will achieve the 20 second goal. It is important that you are aware of this bit of advice, or else you risk thinking the people at the sink next to you are a little crazy or something!
Question for students (and subscribers): Do you wash your hands on a regular basis? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Love, Tiffony. Effective Hand-Washing: Childcare Organizations & Sanitation Management. Tiffony Love, 2015.
