Wash Your Hands! (Personal Health vs Global Viral Diseases, Ebola, Virus, Flu, Colds)
Wash your hands! With the massive spread of Ebola, a fearsome virus that somehow kills most of the people who catch it, we should ever be more careful about personal health. Executives wash your hands! You travel by train, airplane, public transit, or even walk in crowded areas, constantly touch or contact surfaces and people, adding thousands of germs to their hands. A friendly touch, then a rub of your eyes, or a touch of your nose and lips, and you could contract deadly viral infections. I for one fly a lot. One year I circled the globe on commercial airlines 4 times. I often think about all of the things I touch in airplanes, airports, taxis, in subways, elevators, and in the shops and places that I go daily. More and more, I try not to touch my eyes, and more and more, I wash my hands. I almost never get sick.
Yet, CDC says Wash Your Hands because 90% of people, do not wash their hands effectively. Most people wash for an average of 7 to 12 seconds and that does not kill the germs. 20 seconds of warm soapy water, is the minimum, to clean your hands, and experts say, that if you wash your hands several times a day, you have vastly increased your personal hygiene. See the following article that we published in June of 2013, which has been reprinted throughout the world. We encourage you to send this to schools, teachers, children, businesses, and managers of public places. You may save a life. Oh yes, Wash Your Hands!
Wash Your Hands is the point of this article which has been reprinted and spread all over the world, and we encourage that you give it to schools, offices, teachers, and health officials.
I was at a bank convention and in the men's room noticed the President of one of the nation's largest banks. I wanted to meet him, but then I was astonished. HE DIDN'T WASH HIS HANDS, HE JUST ZIPPED UP AND WALKED BACK INTO THE CONVENTION FLOOR TO MEET AND GREET PEOPLE (AND SHAKE HANDS). After that, I didn't want to meet him, and especially didn't want to shake hands with him.
Watch the first video about washing hands. The others are looped in just for people who like video vs reading, but the main topic today is "washing hands".
Over the years, I always notice, and avoid those rude men, who are so arrogant they don't think they need to wash THEIR hands, and they have no respect for other people. The CDC tells us that about 15% of men in America don't wash their hands after using the rest room and a high percentage of those have urine and fecal traces on their hands.Worse than that, the CDC reports that most people don't wash their hands long enough to kill the bacteria. If we washed properly, flu epidemics and the spread of colds would drop substantially. Only 5 percent of people properly washed their hands long enough to kill infection-causing germs and bacteria. Consider Africa and the spread of Ebola. Personal habits of washing hands often and correctly could save so many lives. Think of all the things your hands touch, and life threatening virus can spread by contact.
The CDC says that you should soap and rub your hands under clean water for a minimum of 20 seconds. (Sing Happy Birthday twice and that should get you there).
Interesting facts:
- 95% of people don't wash properly to be effective
- 33% don't use soap (50% of men use soap, 79% of women do)
- 15% of men don't wash hands at all, 7% of women don't wash.
- average wash time is 6 seconds
We credit the June issue of the Journal of Environmental Health, for some of this information.The fecal-oral route is a chief way food borne illness is spread through restaurants, because people don't wash their hands properly.
If you can't wash with water and soap, the CDC recommends an alcohol-based hand sanitizer -- at least 60 percent alcohol -- rubbed all over hand and finger surfaces until it dries. But even that only eliminates a percentage of germs. Nothing is as effective as soap and water.
Here's a song for the kids!