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Clean hands get germ-free



(Source: iStockphoto)

It's easy to start fighting those infectious diseases that are caused by germs, such as viruses and bacteria. Just wash your hands after going to the toilet and before touching food. That way, the germs don't get into your mouth.

Washing your hands is such a simple, and yet so very effective, thing to do. And it seems so easy to get it right — grab some soap, get it wet, and start washing.

So how come it was only very recently that we worked out the correct temperature for the water that we use to wash our hands?

The bacteria on our skin fall into two main classes: the 'resident' bacteria that live there all the time; and the 'transient' bacteria that drop in from time to time.

The resident bacteria have evolved and adapted to survive on the skin. In general, they don't cause disease. In fact, by living on your skin, they stop the nasty bacteria from getting a foothold.

However, if you do continually expose your skin to the nasty transient bacteria, they may become permanent residents, especially if you have skin damage.

You can also classify infections into two main classes: those that you get from the community around you; and those are associated with you getting some health care, such as in a hospital.

First, community-based infections.

Suppose you compare school kids who wash their hands four times each day, as compared to kids who don't wash their hands at all.

The hand-washers have 24 per cent fewer sick days due to respiratory infections, and 51 per cent few days off due to tummy problems.

In fact, proper hand washing could eliminate about half of all cases of food poisoning, also known as food-borne illness.

Continuing with food, food handlers who carry a nasty germ but who do not have any symptoms, are responsible for about one-third of all outbreaks of food poisoning.

But those outbreaks wouldn't have happened if they had good hand washing habits.

Second, healthcare-linked infections.

Each year, hundreds of millions of patients around the world suffer with a healthcare-associated infection.

These infections prolong hospital stays, cause serious illnesses, can lead to a long-term disability and can sometimes kill.

And from a financial point of view, they can inflict massive costs on the patient and on the health-care system.

The annual costs are estimated to be about $6 billion each year in the USA, and about £1 billion in the UK.

In the USA, one out of every 136 hospital patients gets seriously ill from picking up an infection in a hospital, which works out to 2 million cases each year. Out of those, about 80,000 people die.

In the UK, infections associated with healthcare kill about 5000 people each year. The figures are a lot worse in poor countries, than in wealthy countries — about 3–20 times worse.

Hand washing makes so much financial sense. One study in the Russian Federation looked at the cost of one single healthcare-associated infection in a neonatal intensive care unit.

The cost of that single infection (about US$1100) would cover the cost of 3265 days of using hand antiseptic.

One World Health Organisation study looked at 55 hospitals in 14 countries scattered across south-east Asia, Europe, the eastern Mediterranean and the western Pacific.

In this study, about nine per cent of all hospital patients picked up an infection. At any given second, about 1.4 million people in the world are suffering from the complications of an infection associated with healthcare.

In the hospital system, if just one person in a department does not wash their hands, you can have disastrous results.

You've probably heard of the rather nasty bacterium called 'golden staph' (its scientific name is Staphlococcus aureus).

It does bad things to people. But the good news is that it can be stopped with antibiotics.

The bad news is that after 75 years of using antibiotics, a few strains of the golden staph have developed resistance to antibiotics.

So bad things have happened. In a nursery with 45 healthcare workers, one person who was a carrier for antibiotic-resistant golden staph did not wash their hands — and they set off an epidemic.

In another hospital, a single respiratory therapist had chronic sinusitis with (again) antibiotic-resistant golden staph. Again, they did not wash their hands, and set off a hospital-wide epidemic that infected 32 people.

But most people still do not know the correct temperature for washing their hands. And I'll talk more about that dirty business, next time.

Tags: infectious-diseases-other, medical-research, safety

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Published 10 August 2010

© 2014 Karl S. Kruszelnicki Pty Ltd