Parents, teachers, child care providers urged to get kids washing their hands.

Bozeman, Mont., 01 May, 2009 – From swine flu to the common cold, hand washing is the simplest, most effective way of preventing germs from spreading. According to both the World Heath Organization and the Center for Disease Control, the first and most important way to prevent infection and illness is to wash your hands.

But how do you get your kids to properly wash their hands? Sing! To get kids focused on hand washing, and empower them to take responsibility for their health, Project WET created the Hand Washing How-To activity. Kids sing the Hand Washing Song: 20 seconds of soap, water and brisk rubbing rinse the dirt and germs away—including those that may transmit swine flu and other infections.

Hand Washing Song (sung to tune of Frère Jacques) Lather with soap Rub your palms together Now the backs Of your hands Interlace your fingers Cleaning in between them Now the thumbs Clean your nails.

In the activity kids rate the merits of soap, brisk rubbing and rinsing with clean water and practice their hand-washing technique. They are reminded of the “before” and “after” of hand washing. Wash your hands before preparing food, eating, or going to bed, and after using the toilet, coughing or sneezing into hands, or blowing your nose.

Project WET is making Hand Washing How-To available to teachers, community educators (leaders of Boy and Girl Scouts, 4-H, etc.), parents, day-care and after-school providers on its web site and encourages everyone who works with children to conduct this activity as soon as possible.

Hand Washing How-To is important for schools, communities and families, and enables adults to lead by example.

To download Hand Washing How-To, visit http://projectwet.org/project-wet-news-events/blog_entry/hand-washing/.

# # #

About Project WET
Through the publication and distribution of water resource materials, facilitation of workshops on diverse water topics, coordination of community water events and creation of a global network of water professionals, educators and scientists, Project WET is teaching the world about water. Through education, Project WET believes that individuals can be empowered to take action and develop sustainable solutions to community water resource issues. Learn more at http://www.projectwet.org.

For More Information, Contact
Stephanie Kaleva, Project WET Foundation
406-585-4115
stephanie.kaleva@projectwet.org

I know of one other person who didn’t get sick too. Me. I think I didn’t get sick because I drank beer. Did a straw poll once when travelling to see who got sick and who didn’t. Beer drinkers don’t get sick as often. Funny that.

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22507.htm

That Straight Dope article was actually the first thing that got me thinking “the risk factors from not washing your hands after going to the bathroom have GOT to be exaggerated.” Not washing your hands after urinating is a death sentence, but engaging in oral sex with the very same body parts is a small enough infectious risk to be acceptable? Come ON!

And no, Shane, I have never picked up a bug that comes from faecal contamination of food — because the incidence of such infection is so low. How many people ate food prepared by the same person as your partner, but DIDN’T get Shigella? Yes, if you’re going to be preparing food for other people to eat, and touching that food with your bare hands in the process, then washing your hands after using the bathroom makes good sense. But I have yet to hear of a single instance of Shigella contracted from a dirty doorknob.

Thanks for the references on the larger question raised.

… except that in closer inspection the first of Shane’s links doesn’t really treat successful transmission, i.e. infectiousness, which I was for some reason reading into that specific question. It is the same paper I linked to previously.

Why is it, that after years of translating, tweaking and editing the texts that have become known as the Bible, it is now de rigeur to quote from it in incredibly hard to read psuedo-1800s English?

Because the KJV, despite the antiquated English, is agreed by most biblical scholars to be a very accurate translation of the 5,000 or so manuscripts that comprise the historical record of the copying process that brought the NT forward from its obscured beginnings in 150…250 AD or so.

It is both pleasant to read, and IMHO, carries an inbuilt reminder that the text is fairly old in the form of the older English forms within. Something I like to keep in mind when I’m laughing out loud over 2000-year old sheepherder hospitality and codified superstition.

In any case, you shouldn’t assume that just because modern English is the medium, that the translation is better than the KJV. I’ve read several modern translations, and again, IMHO, they’re very poor compared to the KJV; one strong indicator of poor translation in the modern English versions is that they are very different from each other.

Thanks however my point was its relatively disease free potability (if consumed immediately). It has been used as a survival technique but I wasn’t recommending it.

I’m no bible scholar but it’s probably 17th century, KJV, and that’s how they talketh then. I think it is also the purty one.

http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com

Why is it, that after years of translating, tweaking and editing the texts that have become known as the Bible, it is now de rigeur to quote from it in incredibly hard to read psuedo-1800s English?

these particles are called soapons … stimulates your chakra and chi

Hmm. Are they related to karate stimulating chi (ki) particles wax-ons (with anti-particles wax-offs) and ki-aions (a type of aionized phonon pseudo-charge)?

@ Jpo:

Torbjohn

Ordinarily I wouldn’t comment on a misspelling, but that looks like it could be a misreading.

So, if you don’t mind: the way for a non-swede to think of my name is to try to remember that “björn” is swedish for bear. So Torbjörn is “Tor-björn” – read “Thor-Bear” in english. In fact, that is what I get from most visitors anyway.

[Though actually the above works quite well as a mumbled phonetic, typically an englishman can't pronounce the foreign "ö" sound but will have to settle for a rapid "oe" at best anyway. So perhaps I'm doing you a disservice.]

Do we really think that bacteria from the anus make the long trek to the penis?

How would you avoid the probability? It will happen, by particulates in your clothes or by touch transferal (sooner or later).

Remember, we are discussing empirical transfer (i.e. probabilities et cetera), not anecdotes (“I never make mistakes”, “I’m perfectly clean at all times”, et cetera).

And urine isn’t guaranteed to be non-infected at all times either, thanks to urinary infections.

[Fun factoid: as I remember it, they have now found bacterial films that can grow inside urine tracts. So even if healthy urine is essentially sterile, and still a good emergency sterile wash, it is probably not completely so. I hope to be corrected, if I'm wrong on this.]

Apparently, then, most people weren’t taught not to poop on their hands?’

As I seem to remember hearing it, there is speculation is that the reason humans find indole and skatole so offensive, as opposed to animals that readily ingest or otherwise use their feces for various reasons, is because feces are harmful to keep around by way of infections.

Sort of like the way putrescine and cadaverine are thought to be offensive IIRC, except that the actual harm isn’t from keeping cadavers around (except if they died from some types of infection perhaps) but from ingesting them.

And in most cultures these things have been reinforced to taboos of several kinds. Again, as I seem to remember hearing it, there is speculation that many taboos fill useful functions, for example taboos against kinship sex that avoids too much inbreeding.

Presumably those other animal populations have found the benefits overwhelm the harm for them, for example rabbits having to pass food twice in order to extract necessary nutrients.

Thanks for the references on the larger question raised.

[But - funny though how several people just seemed to blank out their existence and continued to pretend that washing doesn't have an observable effect here. Denialism?]

Seems that hand washing after defecation is more community protection than self protection.

I believe that is correct; handwashing before is both, handwashing afterwards is mostly the former.

But then again, there are parasites that transmit by eggs that you would want to avoid ingesting to keep the infection down. And generally if you are already infected, it will probably help a lot against prolonging the infection.

@Kent: Some sneeze – at a hundred thousand miles an hour, how far away are those folks blown each time they sneeze?

Okay.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=182474
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2001109
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2564069

It could be just me, but I find it a little bit disingenuous to write a post espousing the virtues of hand-washing to prevent the spread of disease with a post title that references swine flu and a post entry that primarly references bacterial diseases.

All I’m saying is that for all we seem to know, one might better protect themselves from viral diseases by maintaining a strong immune system through healthy eating and exercise, in which case suggesting that hand-washing is a strong preventative is misleading and possibly not even true.

Or Cairnos has probably guessed correctly. Either way, you should be covered

Apparently not.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urophagia#Attempting_survival

My understanding is urine worsens dehydration.

Quite possible I guess. The same has been said about urine. Drinking urine is a survival technique.

There seems an accepted wisdom that re-ingestion is bad for the re-ingestor but I wonder where that comes from. Is it instinct or does it come from mommy’s “Oh, yuk! Bad! Bad! Bad!”? If it tastes the way it smells — yours, obviously, as mine doesn’t stink — then it’s a wonder anyone would have experimented with it.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1043/why-are-men-supposed-to-wash-their-hands-after-urination