HAND HYGIENE

The importance of hand hygiene

Washing your hands properly is one of the most important things you can do to help prevent and control the spread of many illnesses. Good hand hygiene will reduce the risk of things like flu, food poisoning and healthcare associated infections being passed from person to person.Improper hand hygiene can lead to several fatal diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea . Pneumonia is the number one cause of mortality among children under five years old, taking the life of an estimated 1.8 million children per year. Diarrhea and pneumonia together account for almost 3.5 million child deaths annually.

When you need to wash your hands

The hands normally carry lots of germs and should be washed:

• after visiting the toilet
• before handling food
• when the hands are visibly dirty
• after coughing or sneezing into your hands

How to wash your hands

It is important that you wash your hands properly. Make sure that you wash both your hands including the tips of your fingers, the palms of your hands and thumbs.

The steps below show you how to wash your hands properly:

1. Wet hands with water	2. Apply enough soap to cover all surfaces of hand	3. Rub hands palm to palm
4. Right palm over back of left hand with interlaced fingers and vice versa	5. Palm to palm with fingers interlaced	6. Back of fingers to opposing palms with fingers interlocked
7. Rotational rubbing of left thumb clasped in right palm and vice versa	8. Rotational rubbing, backwards and forwards with clasped fingers of right hand in left palm and vice versa	9. Rinse hands with water
10. Dry hands thoroughly with a single use towel	11. Use towel to turn off tap	12. Your hands are now clean

Global Handwashing Day

 (GHD) is a campaign to motivate and mobilize millions around the world to wash their hands with soap. It takes place on October 15 of each year. The campaign is dedicated to raising awareness of hand washing with soap as a key approach to disease prevention.

In India in September and October, a mass media campaign was held in India with the support of Sachin Tendulkar and Yuvraj Singh, two hugely popular cricket celebrities.

Almost 1 million school teachers received training courses to execute the campaign and to reach out to about 100 million school children. Materials developed included: posters, teacher training module on hand washing, pamphlet with pledge for students, TV spots and radio jingles, all including 25 seconds central song on the 5 steps for correct hand washing.

So, everyone must try to educate children about the importance of hand hygiene to keep them away from fatal diseases.