Handwashing: you’re doing it wrong
Good citizens do it for 42.5 seconds
It’s likely that you occasionally wash your hands. Right? Well, according to a new report, you’re probably doing it wrong. This week a study revealed that the the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines for hand-washing are much more effective than the current US recommendation. They’re also nearly twice as rigorous. Instead of a 3-step, 35-second process, the WHO advocates a 6-step, 42.5-second process.
Six steps to clean hands? Sounds a little excessive. Then again, hand washing, one of the most important public health developments ever, is serious business.
Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis was the first to tout the health benefits of the practice in the mid-19th century. Semmelweis was trying to solve the mystery of “childbed fever,” a fatal illness affecting women who’d just given birth. After a number of failed attempts to determine its cause, one of the doctor’s colleagues caught the fever and died. Semmelweis realized it was transmissible and introduced some of the first modern medical hygiene practices — mandatory hand washing and sterilization of medical instruments in a chlorine solution.
The impact of handwashing can’t really be overstated. The Centers for Disease Control calls it a “do-it-yourself vaccination.” Since it’s has been proven to drastically reduce the rate of transmission of infection, public health campaigns encouraging clean hands have been rolled out all around the world.
Hand washing even became part of a moral directive to serve one’s nation by practicing good hygiene. From Soviet Constructivist warnings of the 1920s to the conflation of clean hands with good citizenship in America, here are some posters from the past that exhort the dirty masses to lather up:
Dutch diligence: this poster from the Netherlands says, “Paper is good but hand washing is better.” Judgy sandwich etiquette, but good advice.
This Soviet poster reads “Dirty hands mean trouble. In order to not get sick, be cultured: before eating, wash your hands with soap!” Cleanliness is next to godlessness, comrade.
The Soviets really liked handwashing. This poster reminds those busy building the workers’ utopia that “Dirty hands are a source of infection. Wash your hands after work and before eating.”
Happy heteronormative holiday time requires hygiene! And hot dogs. At least according to this British public health poster.
This poster from the US reminds us that good citizens keep clean, and only take their fair allotment of paper towel!
