If we were to talk to the average person about 5 years ago about the importance of hand hygiene you’d definitely get a very different response than if you were to ask the same question nowadays simply because times have changed and we soon realized the cost of not taking care of your hand hygiene.
Even if we were to discard the looming fear of Covid-19, we still had serious outbreaks last year of E. Coli and norovirus which all stemmed from the poor hygiene that the people involved displayed.
Now that the flu season is on us we’re exposed even more than before to it, which is why we need to take into consideration all of the costs that come with poor hand hygiene. The sad reality is that while a lot of us understand how important it is, there are still many that discard hand hygiene as objectively unnecessary, which is what we’re here to correct.
The truth is that the diseases that can be spread by poor hand hygiene are not limited to those mentioned above, there’s a whole plethora of possible diseases that you can contract if you don’t take care of your hands.
We even have Darrel hicks, one of the top infection prevention consultants from St. Louis himself stating the fact that as far as we know it, it’s abysmal to see how little people actually care about their hand hygiene nowadays.
We all know that hygiene in itself is what keeps us going, if we disregard any aspect of our hygiene it won’t be long before we end up riddled with diseases from head to toe.
According to a study that was conducted back in 2013 by the Michigan State University, it appears as though less than 5 percent of our population actually washes their hands properly after they go to the bathroom.
Outside of that, according to a different study, less than 50 percent of all of the residents of our country actually fail to wash their hands properly, even if they do wash their hands to begin with.
What this means is that we as a society need to change this otherwise we’ll end up with a lot more diseases to worry about than just Covid-19.
At the end of the day, if your hands are contaminated then you might as well just be a bus taking the viruses away with you everywhere you go, spreading them from person to person, effectively ruining lives over the fact that you didn’t want to wash your hands that day.
Businesses should also start supporting the idea of enforcing proper hand hygiene rules around the office because any sort of bad hygiene will lead to the company losing billions of dollars thanks to the workers calling in sick at the worst time.
Not only that, but we as a society, have gotten used to demanding that we go to the hospital out of literally any problem whatsoever, but what people don’t seem to understand is that hospitals are not completely clean either.
According to a recent study, it was reported that well over 100,000 people pass away every single year because they went to the hospital and they got infected there. Why? Because the hand hygiene there was below average, making it so that the diseases that the people carried would be spread all around the hospital, attacking between 1 and 3 million people every year through healthcare-associate infections.
As you can already tell, this is no laughing matter as this can happen to anyone and everyone around the world. The fact is that we need to change this for ourselves if we actually want our children to live in a disease-free society.
The demand for cleaning agencies is through the roof, especially now considering the recent pandemic and all of that, but what’s worse about it all is the fact that even these professional cleaning crews still end up with poor hand hygiene at the same time.
We pride ourselves with our cleaning and we take care of ourselves properly too, but we can’t vouch for everyone and everything out there. As it turns out, if you want to boost hand hygiene it must start from you, show off the fact that it’s not hard to take care of your hands and in doing so you can ensure a better future for your children and their children moving onwards.
Even Brian Sansoni from the American Cleaning Institute stated in an interview that the absolute best thing we can do to combat the pandemic and any other sort of disease out there isn’t to wear a mask at all times, but to properly take care of our hands as much as possible.
While the mask is extremely helpful and we always endorse using it when going out, we still have to demand that you prioritize your hand hygiene at all costs, to the point where you might want to carry around your own cleaning solution to make sure that you’re not unprepared for the occasion.
Overall, though, what you should take from this is that hand hygiene is no laughing matter, it is a matter of life and death as we’ve seen over the years, time and time again. If you want to get back to the way things were and subsequently make the world a better place then wash your hands properly.
Doing the right thing won’t take you longer than 10 minutes a day, but it can definitely save your life later on and the life of those around you. Especially if you work inside a closed space or even worse, if you happen to go to school as a teacher or a student, make sure that your hands are clean at all times so that you don’t end up hurting those around you and yourself too. Stay safe out there and always remember to clean yourself properly before going out and as soon as you get back home.