The World Health Organization says hand hygiene is the most important measure to avoid transmission of harmful germs and to prevent infections. The same applies at home, work, or wherever you are.
But dangling your fingers under the water long enough to get them wet before grabbing a paper towel or soaping up the palms and not the rest your hands will not get the job done.
“Infection control is so important. I don’t think sometimes people realize it, but it’s really the cornerstone of healthcare,” said Cynthia Matthews-Snow, a nurse who is the Quality Control/Infection Control coordinator at Betty Jean Kerr People’s Health Centers on Delmar in St. Louis.
“Handwashing is the simple and almost standalone way to prevent the spread of infection. Everything else builds upon handwashing – especially, when we are in the influenza season.”
She stressed importance of getting a flu vaccine as well.
“Research says over 80 percent of communicable diseases are spread by touching things,” she said. “It can be direct touch or indirect touch.”
Think of direct touch as person-to-person and indirect touch as touching a contaminated doorknob, light switch or some other object. Remember, germs are invisible to the naked eye.
Teaching the community proper ways to wash hands cuts down on the risk of infection, the need to use of antibiotics and not adding to increased antibiotic resistance, she said.
What is the best method to wash your hands thoroughly?
Matthew-Snow said the first thing you do is stand away from the sink (where organisms can be lurking) a bit and turn the water on. Use comfortably warm water and wet the hands before soaping them.
“You want enough soap,” she said. “You are going to do palm to palm, and then you’re going to do the back of the hand – what we call the dorsum.”
Then repeat with the other side – palm to-palm, palm to dorsum. Then clean inside the fingers.
“You’re going to make sure your fingers interlace – and you still got a pretty good lather,” she said. “That’s the back of the fingers on both hands. You’re not going to forget the thumbs – now, you’re going to do the tips of your fingers.”
On each hand, the tips are pursed together and scrubbed in a circular manner in the palm.
When all parts of her hands were thoroughly washed and scrubbed, without touching the inside of the sink, Matthews-Snow let the water run down over each hand to rinse away all soap residue.
And as for that “shaking the excess water off the hands before you dry them” thing that most of us are guilty of doing at one time or another – according to the handwashing police, that’s flinging potential germs all over the sink and vanity.
Handwashing vs. sanitizers
Wash hands with warm water and soap when hands are visibly dirty, soiled and after using the bathroom. Alcohol-based hand cleaners or sanitizers are effective when the hands are not dirty, and are faster and more effective for routine hand cleansing if the hands are not visibly soiled.
“Interestingly enough, the hand rubs and the hand sanitizers in the hospitals and health care facilities are less irritating,” Matthews-Snow said.
Using a hand-rub sanitizer to cleanse hands pretty much follows along the lines of the soap cleansing. The WHO method has you starting with a palm-full of sanitizer – not a coin-sized dollop. After all – the sanitizer has a lot of area to cover. The entire process takes 20-30 seconds.
Paper towels vs. hand dryers
Matthews-Snow loves her some paper towels, and she said you should too – lots of them.
“This is what I tell people: use up all of their paper towels,” she said with a laugh. “Use them up. Use up everybody’s paper towels.”
Matthews-Snow uses one towel to dry one area, tosses it, then grabs another paper towel for another area, and so on. One rub, then it’s thrown away.
The last step is to turn off the water with another clean, dry paper towel. Otherwise, the germs you just wiped off may now be making their way to the sink knob or even the bathroom door handle for some unsuspecting soul to come in contact with later.
As for those hot-air blowing hand dryers – think of them as a whirlwind germ party from the floor up.
“The blowers are not the best idea. Stuff is getting in the air. And when you have those blowers, it’s just blowing everything that has settled in the atmosphere in the air, and now you’ve just stirred it all up and it’s on your hands,” she said. “But if you don’t have anything in there, then I guess you’d have to use the blowers.”
Once you are out of harm’s way, she said, it wouldn’t hurt to follow it up with some hand sanitizer.
For more information about handwashing, go to https://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/when-how-handwashing.html.
