Proper Hand Washing Proves Essential To Overall Good Health

Jet, March 20, 2000

The next time you turn a doorknob, pick up a telephone, or shake hands with someone, consider this: millions of disease-causing organisms are lurking on practically everything you handle every day.

Cold and flu viruses, hepatitis, E. coli and Staphylococcus aureus (or Staph), are just a few of the germs that get spread to your hands when you touch a contaminated item. All it takes is for you to touch your eyes or nose or mouth, and the germs enter your body, multiply and make you sick.

Even when your hands look clean, the germs are still hiding there, invisible to the naked eye. And they aren't just limited to your palms or the backs of your hands.

"If the hand is a continent, the sub-ungual spaces (under the fingernails) are the caves," Barry Michaels, a microbiologist with Georgia-Pacific, a hygiene-products manufacturer, told Gurney Williams III of Discover magazine. An alarming 95 percent of bacteria found on hands is hiding under the fingernails.

But you don't have to wear sterile gloves or live in fear of touching things to keep nasty bacteria and viruses at bay. Experts say the easiest way to combat germs is to wash your hands.

"With the possible exception of immunization, hand-washing is the most effective disease-preventing measure anyone can practice," Ralph Cordell, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, told Discover.

At a minimum, people should wash their hands after using the bathroom, before eating or preparing food, after playing with a pet, changing a baby's diaper, and after coughing, sneezing or blowing your nose, said Becky Clapper, registered nurse and infection control coordinator at St. Joseph Health Center and St. Joseph Hospital West in St. Charles, MO, to Dr. Hank Clever of the St. Charles County Post, which was published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

"People have all sorts of reasons why they don't wash their hands," Clapper told the newspaper. "They think they don't have time. They forget, or they think if their hands look clean, they are clean, which we know is not true," she said. "The germs that cause disease are microscopic and they come from thousands of sources, so the best way to get rid of the germs is to wash often."

The proper way to wash your hands, says Business Wire, is to lather up for at least 20 seconds, cleaning fingers, wrists, backs of hands and underneath fingernails. Rinse thoroughly with warm, running water. Dry hands with a clean, fresh paper towel to keep from getting old germs on clean hands. Also, be sure to regularly moisturize hands with lotion to help prevent skin from drying out, cracking and becoming infected.