You can save lives with your hands

María Jiménez Herrera
Researcher at the Department of Nursing
maria.jimenez(ELIMINAR)@urv.cat

Over the last hundred years, education regarding hand hygiene has had a decisive impact on the control of various diseases transmitted through contact, thereby improving the quality of life for many people.

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor of German origin, known worldwide as the saviour of mothers, discovered that disinfecting his hands before attending to women in childbirth reduced the number of deaths of women and babies from puerperal fever, and although he faced great difficulty in proving his theories, they eventually prevailed and were subsequently corroborated by the famous nurse, Florence Nightingale, during the Crimean War.

Of all the actions we perform every day, washing our hands is one of the most common, even if we are not fully aware of its importance, especially in reducing illnesses and the spread of infections and viruses. Every day we come into contact with harmful germs that are present everywhere, but which can be controlled with proper hand hygiene.

Daily contact with people, surfaces and objects causes hands to accumulate and carry germs invisibly. These microorganisms can cause infections if you touch your eyes, nose or mouth, or if you transmit them to other people. Although you can't keep your hands completely free of germs, washing them often with soap and water can help reduce the transfer of bacteria, viruses and other microbes.

Unfortunately, in many countries, sanitation and access to water make proper hand hygiene difficult, which causes serious illnesses in a very large number of people each year.

Consequently, organisations such as the WHO and UNICEF, among others, promote hand hygiene education among children and families and in communities and countries to teach them how to protect themselves from infections transmitted through their hands.

Preventing disease leads to a reduction in antibiotic use and, therefore, reduces the development of antibiotic resistance. Handwashing can prevent around 30% of diarrhoea-related illnesses and nearly 20% of respiratory infections.

Some of the diseases that can be prevented with hand hygiene are respiratory infections (e.g. the common cold, influenza A virus, pneumonia, whooping cough, bronchiolitis), faecal-oral transmitted diseases (e.g. cholera, diarrhoea, hepatitis A and E), and other diseases such as gastroenteritis, gastritis, pneumococcus, hand, foot and mouth disease or intestinal worms.

The coronavirus pandemic brought hand hygiene to the fore as one of the most effective measures to control and prevent infections, and since then, measures to strengthen this practice have increased in order to help prevent the transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

It is important to wash your hands before and after the following activities:

• Preparing and eating food.
• Treating wounds or caring for a sick person.
• Entering or leaving a public place.
• Sneezing, coughing or sneezing.
• Handling food

Some facts about washing your hands:

• Around 33% of people do not use soap when washing their hands.
• Lift buttons have 20% bacteria on their surface.
• Hands have microorganisms known as saprophytic flora and transient or contaminating flora; the latter reaches the hands through direct or indirect contamination from other people or surfaces.
• Women wash their hands more than men.
• 3 billion people worldwide do not have access to soap and water for handwashing.
• People wash their hands more in the morning than in the afternoon.
• Handwashing could prevent up to one million deaths from preventable diseases each year.

You can keep your hands clean in two ways:

• By using an alcohol-based hand sanitiser. This is a quick, effective and well-tolerated method for disinfecting your hands.
• By washing your hands with soap and water. This should be done for at least 40 seconds.