Operation clean hands: how hygiene protects health

In hospitals, but also in everyday life, hand washing is an important prevention tool.

Our hands are the most versatile and precious “tool” we have. But they are also the most exposed part of the body” and in communication with the world around us. Invisible microorganisms included, even “bad”. For this reason, a simple and underestimated gesture such as washing hands with water and, possibly, soap has a very high hygienic value.

Suffice it to say that the high mortality of childbirth that affected Western women until just over a century ago collapsed when a Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis, in the Vienna hospital where he worked, noticed that many women were affected by puerperal fever or sepsis if followed by doctors, while it was better than those helped only by midwives. After a series of field observations, Semmelweis realized that many doctors (but not midwives) passed with ease from autopsies to deliveries, without washing their hands. Asking colleagues to disinfect their hands with calcium chloride, the deaths of women who have recently given birth from sepsis plummeted.

Even today, more than one and a half million people in the world die because they do not have clean water available and one in three people does not have access to sanitation and is therefore more exposed to the risk of epidemics and diseases, such as cholera. The World Health Organization has dedicated an ad hoc information campaign to this simple gesture: “Save lives: clean your hands”.

The problem of hospital infections

But even at home, hygienic neglect is among the main causes of a real health emergency, closely connected to antibiotic resistance: out of 10 million patients hospitalized every year, about 6% contract an infection (such as pneumonia or septicemia) during hospitalization and 1% face death.

It is estimated that about half of deaths from hospital infections would be avoided with proper prevention: sterility of operators and equipment during patient care. In fact, the most frequent vehicles for the transmission of hospital infections are first of all the hands of the health workers themselves, in addition to objects that come into contact with wounds or burns such as needles or scalpels, those that come into contact with intact mucous membranes such as endoscopes or dental impression holders, everyday objects such as phonendoscopes or stretchers and, finally, the walls, floors, ventilation systems and water supply.

The problem is so widespread (in Europe it affects 4.1 million people in hospital) that a Swiss company has developed a “digital sentinel” consisting of a smartphone, infrared sensors near the sinks specific for washing, position indicators to determine the presence of the care worker in the patient room and a system for drafting feedback on hygiene compliance for the healthcare facility and staff, with sound signals that remind the operator to perform sanitation procedures.

How and why to wash your hands

In everyday life, washing hands is the only really effective measure to prevent the most “banal” and “incurable” of infections, colds, as well as the most complex flu epidemics. But also, together with the foresight to drink only from sealed bottles, to keep away from traveler’s diarrhea and other diseases affecting the gastrointestinal system that affect us on vacation and beyond.

The best way to wash your hands? Liquid soap guarantees more hygiene than solid soaps, you must also soap in the space between your fingers and rub your hands for a minute before rinsing and drying them carefully to avoid the risk of fungal infections.

It is always recommended to have a hand sanitizer without water: British and American surveys have highlighted that among the most “dirty” things we touch every day there are not public toilets, but bus and metro handrails, the ATM keyboard, the handle of the supermarket trolley.