Awareness of Hand Washing With Soap
Handwashing is likely to be especially important where people congregate (schools, offices), where ill or vulnerable people are concentrated (hospitals, nursing homes), where food is prepared and shared and in homes, especially where there are young children and vulnerable adults.
An ABC News report on low handwashing rates among physicians cited the book Freakonomics: "Studies have shown that hospital personnel wash or disinfect their hands fewer than half the times they should," Levitt and Dubner write. "And doctors are the worst offenders, more lax than either nurses or aides." In fact, one Australian study reported a hand washing compliance rate of only 9 percent. Medical personnel who fail in this regard continue to exhibit the same sort of general arrogance that dismissed the clear evidence presented by Ignaz Semmelweiss from 1847 onwards. Just as in Semmmelweiss' time, although it is clearly demonstrable that disease transmission can readily be prevented by hand washing with soap, medical practitioners often failed to do so because of lack of time, rough paper towels for drying, inconveniently located sinks and hands chapped by frequent washing with drying soaps. A handwashing campaign begun in New York City public hospitals has drastically reduced the number of serious infections, such as blood infections and pneumonia, contracted by hospital patients.
Around the world, the observed rates of handwashing with soap at critical moments range from zero percent to 34 percent. The belief that washing with water alone to remove visible dirt is sufficient to make hands clean is commonplace in most countries. In Ghana the drive to use soap for mothers was generally successful because it felt good to remove dirty matter from hands, refreshing, one way of caring for children, and enhancing their social status.
We could talk about germs until we were blue in the face, and it didn’t change behaviors —Dr. Curtis (director of the Hygiene Center at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine),Read more about this topic: Hand Washing With Soap
Famous quotes containing the words awareness of, awareness, hand, washing and/or soap:
“The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,
Or in the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit....”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Another hand thy sword shall wield,
Another hand the standard wave,
Till from the trumpet’s mouth is pealed
The blast of triumph o’er thy grave.”
—William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878)
“The California fever is not likely to take us off.... There is neither romance nor glory in digging for gold after the manner of the pictures in the geography of diamond washing in Brazil.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)