Handwashing
January 2009

SCOTLAND: Hand-washing drive to cut superbugs
26.jan.09
Press Association
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5ijSs-87eYrUQL4L-54vMIwhaPvFg
A "zero tolerance policy" for NHS staff who fail to wash their hands has been declared by the Scottish Government.
And the public will be able to check superbug infection rates and levels of hand cleanliness for each hospital under the new measures.
The latest moves in the battle against hospital infection were announced by health secretary Nicola Sturgeon.
A "one-stop shop" is to be set up to give public access to all published information on hospital infection rates and hand hygiene compliance.
This will be available on a website which will be established by the end of the month.
The "zero tolerance" approach has been set out by the Scottish Government's chief nursing officer, Paul Martin, in a letter to all health board chief executives.
Figures earlier this month showed varying levels of compliance for hand hygiene.
The target level for compliance in Scotland is at least 90%. Overall, this target is being exceeded, at 93%.
But within this total, compliance levels vary from 95% for nurses to 84% for medical staff.

TEXAS: Hand washing worries & poor produce at Thai restaurant
24.jan.09
WOAI.com
Mireya Villarreal
http://www.woai.com/content/troubleshooters/story/Hand-Washing-Worries-Poor-Produce-at-Thai/dkdGA27pjE69QcxojeeK4Q.cspx
SAN ANTONIO -- A local Thai restaurant on the north side is in hot water tonight. A health inspector busted employees not washing their hands and found spoiled veggies in the fridge.
News 4 WOAI Trouble Shooter Mireya Villarreal is uncovering all the dirty details in this week's Kitchen Cops.
The restaurant didn't just receive a bad inspection score, they also have a complaint on file. A customer said their sushi was old, the ingredients were poor quality, and the customer also found a bug in their soup.
So, the Kitchen Cops visited Thai Lao located off West Rector just behind North Star Mall.
The health inspector was worried when he didn't see a single employee wash their hands. Some other concerns included a lack of soap and towels, poor produce, and old cookware.
News 4 WOAI Trouble Shooter spoke with Thai Lao's owner over the phone. He told us all the problems were fixed and even gave us permission to tour his restaurant.

3 best tips for proper hand washing among medical professionals
22.jan.09
Medical Business
Brent McNutt
http://www.articleh.com/articles/14701/1/3-Best-Tips-For-Proper-Hand-Washing-Among-Medical-Professionals/Page1.html
"Cleanliness is next to godliness." The origin of this expression is unclear, though it could have originated from ancient Hebrew or Egyptian writings. The first English version seems to have originated from Francis Bacon. In any case, the meaning of the expression is clear: keeping your body clean is vital.
Cleanliness is important in any workplace; however, it is crucial in certain occupations. For instance, cleanliness is a top priority in the medical industry. Bacteria can become a life and death issue. Fortunately, the personnel can use a wide variety of methods, including the wearing of scrubs, such as cheap landau scrubs. Keeping your hands clean as a bean is another method to prevent the transferring of bacteria. Here are some tips for effective hand washing:
1. Understand the importance of hand washing
According to some experts, washing our hands is the most effective way to prevent diseases from spreading. That is due to the link between bacteria and diseases. Diseases spread when we contact fluids from people's bodies. For instance, consider someone with the common cold. After blowing his nose, he could inadvertently place mucous on a doorknob. The virus can survive there for a while, and thus be transmitted to another person who touches the doorknob. By simply washing our hands frequently and being conscientious about what we touch, we can reduce the transmission of bacteria.
In addition to the common cold, failing to wash your hands throughout the day, can increase the
likelihood of transmitting numerous infections, including the common cold, digestive viruses, flu, hepatitis A, and skin infections.
2. Wash at the proper time
How often should you wash your hands? Experts recommend that people wash them at least 10 times daily. However, those in the medical profession should wash them even more frequently. For instance, here are some activities after which you should scrub away:
- before you eat
- after you eat
- before touching your nose, mouth, or eyes
- after contacting fluids from bodies
- after contacting items that have contacted fluids from bodies
- after using the restroom
You might be shocked at how infrequently people wash their hands. After using the restroom, only about two-thirds of Americans wash their hands!
3. Wash your hands by using the proper technique
Washing your hands properly does not involve rinsing your hands quickly. Instead, you should use certain techniques. Use warm, soapy water and wash them for roughly 15-30 seconds. If you do not feel like using a stopwatch, wash your hands while singing the "ABC song." Then rinse your hands thoroughly. Experts have determined that the length of time you wash your hands, is much more important than the type of soap that you use (i.e. antibacterial soap).
Remember that bacteria exist even when we cannot see them. If you are in the medical field, wash your hands at the right time, and in the right way. Your increased contact with humans increases the chance of bacteria transmission. If you wear a scrub, then make sure to scrub!

The science of hand washing to ward off cold, flu bugs
20.jan.09
USA Today
Elizabeth Weise
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-01-20-handwashing-cold-and-flu_N.htm
Cold and flu season is here, filling the streets with a great chorus of coughing, dripping, hacking, sniffling humanity. And there's one cheap, easy, clinically proven way to avoid joining them.
Wash your hands.
Here's the drill: Scrub vigorously with water and soap until lather appears, making sure to get between your fingers and fingernails. Use a nail brush if you have one. Briskly dry with a towel.
Do it often and you'll stay a lot healthier — 24% less like to get a respiratory illness and 45% to 50% less likely to get a stomach bug, says the World Health Organization.
Hand washing "has a huge health impact," says Anna Bowen, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Water is not the most important part, it's "the friction and duration," she says. "You really need to scrub vigorously for about 20 seconds."
Still not convinced?
"Eighty percent of infections are transported by touch, so hand washing is the number one thing you can to do prevent infection," says Michael Smith, WebMD's chief medical editor in Atlanta.
And not just when you're leaving the restroom.
"Take the opportunity to take a hand washing break," Smith says. "Any time you're touching something that other people frequently touch, it's a good time to wash your hands."
Not that we do. According to an American Society for Microbiology survey, 91% of Americans said they always washed after using a public restroom. But when researchers actually watched, it turned out only 83% did.
Barely. When people wash their hands, only 33% use soap and only 16% adequately wash. The average hand washing time was a pathetic 11 seconds, says Charles Peter Gerba, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Popular alcohol hand gels aren't as effective as soap and water but they're better than nothing, Smith says.
Soap and water help dislodge dirt, bacteria and viruses so they "can go down the drain," he says. With gels, "the bacteria has nowhere to go."
On the other hand, don't buy the antibacterial soap hype. There's little evidence it's any more effective.
Then there's the question of how to dry newly washed hands.
Air dryers first became popular in the 1970s, developed to reduce paper usage, save energy and cut maintenance costs. But consumers didn't like them, and today they're in only 6% of U.S. public restrooms, according to the consumer research company Mintel.
Which works better, paper towels or dryers, is hotly debated.
Doug Powell, a professor of food safety at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan., says numerous papers show that the friction created by using paper towels is actually a key part of the cleaning process. The friction "removes the bacteria, whereas blow dryers tend to disperse them in the air," he says.
However, a study done by the Mayo Clinic in 2000 found that four potential drying methods, paper towel, cloth roller towel, warm forced-air dryer and "spontaneous room air evaporation," were all about equal in terms of removing bacteria.
A study done at Rutgers found that forced-air drying left slightly more bacteria on hands, while paper towels left slightly less.
Do warm forced-air dryers breed bacteria, spewing it back over clean hands? Some research has found bacteria colonizing in the machines, though the findings are flatly denied by the hand dryer industry.

QUEBEC: 3 out of 4 doctors skip hand washing
06.jan.09
Montreal Gazette
Aaron Derfel
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/story.html?id=3df82857-7efb-46cf-815e-912524b990a6
Only one in four doctors wash their hands between patients on some wards within the McGill University Health Centre, an internal audit has found.
Nurses do a better job, but their rate of compliance is still 40 to 50 per cent - a factor that's blamed for the spread of germs and deadly infections in hospitals.
What's more, results from the audit taken last year show little progress since a study was conducted at the MUHC in 2001. That study found that fewer than one in four doctors and less than 40 per cent of nurses took hand-hygiene precautions.
Charles Frenette, medical director of infection control at the MUHC, acknowledged yesterday that his department has had a difficult time persuading health professionals to take handwashing seriously.

US: To protect yourself, wash those germs away
02.jan.09
HealthDay News
Dennis Thompson
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/02/AR2009010201824.html
Of all the advice your mother gave you, there's one tidbit that doctors stand by as the best way to keep yourself healthy:
Wash your hands.
Keeping hands free of germs is one of the simplest and most effective ways to keep from catching the flu, a cold or some other infectious disease, experts say.
"Disease transmission is hand-to-hand combat, at least for infectious diseases," said Dr. Thomas Weida, professor of family and community medicine at Penn State University's Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pa. "By washing your hands regularly, you decrease the spread of disease."
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists hand-washing as one of the top recommended ways to avoid catching the flu.
Hand-washing also can keep you from becoming infected with bacteria such as salmonella or E. coli, said Marcia Patrick, director of infection prevention and control for MultiCare, a health system in Tacoma, Wash. That's critical because the CDC says an estimated 76 million Americans are stricken with a food-borne illness each year, and 5,000 die from their illness.
"All the different things we touch in the regular course of our day can contain germs: grocery cart handles, elevator buttons, keyboards, telephones," added Patrick, who's also a spokeswoman for the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology.
Those germs transfer to your hands, and from your hands get into the body through the eyes, nose or mouth.
"A lot of upper respiratory infections are caused by hands that got contaminated by someone else's upper respiratory discharges," Patrick said.
Basic hand-washing involving soap and water is a relatively simple affair, but the order in which you do things is important. Start with warm water and wet your hands. After that, dispense the soap into your hands.
"What that does is [help] disperse the soap over the hands' surface," Patrick said. "If you put the soap in your hands and then wet them, you lose a lot of the soap to the running water."
Then rub your hands together vigorously for at least 15 to 30 seconds, scrubbing all surfaces of the hands and fingers, Weida said. That friction is key because it dislodges all the germs -- bacteria and viruses -- from the skin surface.
"To do a thorough job, when you're standing in front of a sink, it can seem interminable," Patrick said. "Singing through at a reasonable pace either 'Happy Birthday' or 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat' twice will help you get through it."
Afterward, rinse your hands briskly in running water to remove the suds -- and with them, the germs. "Make sure you rinse thoroughly to get all the soap off because soaps can be drying to your skin," Patrick said.
Blot your hands dry with a couple of paper towels to finish the job. "Ideally, use the damp towels to then turn the faucet off," Weida said.
You might also consider using the paper towels to open the door on your way out of the restroom, too, Patrick said.
"How many times have you been in a stall and there's a toilet flush and the next sound you hear is the person leaving, with no stop at the bathroom sink?" she said.
Weida and Patrick differ on whether your soap should be antibacterial or not.
Although regular soap will do the job, Weida prefers antibacterial soap. "I don't have any studies showing one way or the other," he said, "but I tend to lean toward antibacterial."
But Patrick is concerned that antibacterial soaps can be harsh on the skin, particularly if people wash their hands as often as they should. "If you are washing your hands thoroughly, regular soap is great," she said.
Both agree that if your hands are visibly clean, and you just want to make sure that you're not transmitting germs, then an alcohol-based disinfectant gel will work just as well as soap and water.
"The alcohol gel works very well," Patrick said. "It will kill upwards of 99 percent of the bacteria on your skin, and does it quickly and cleanly."
Just apply a dab to your hands and rub until it evaporates, Weida said. The friction assists the alcohol in killing the germs on your hands.
In general, you should clean your hands before you eat or after you go to the bathroom, Weida said.
The CDC also recommends washing your hands after changing diapers, before and after tending to someone who is sick, after handling an animal or animal waste, after handling garbage, before and after treating a cut or wound, and after blowing your nose, coughing or sneezing.
"For me, here in the office, our policy is to use an alcohol-based hand-washing gel both before and after we examine a patient," Weida said. "Before so I don't give something to the patient, and after so the patient doesn't give something to me."
"People ask me, 'Gosh, what special shot do you get to keep yourself healthy, seeing all these sick people?' And I say it's hand-washing that protects me," Weida said.