Most of this article is adapted from information published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
How hand washing protects your family from colds and flu
Hand washing is simple, and it's the best way to prevent colds, flu, and other infections and illnesses at home, school, and work. Following proper hand-washing guidelines yourself – and teaching your children to do the same – may be your most powerful tool for keeping your family healthy.
At home, hand washing can prevent infection and illness from spreading from family member to family member and, sometimes, throughout a community. The basic rule is to wash your hands before preparing food and after handling uncooked meat and poultry; before eating; after changing diapers; after coughing, sneezing, or blowing your nose; and after using the bathroom.
Wash your hands: The right way
Proper hand hygiene using soap and water
- Wet your hands with clean running water and apply soap. Use warm water if it's available.
- Rub hands together to make a lather and scrub all surfaces.
- Continue rubbing hands for 15 to 20 seconds. Teach your kids to sing "Happy Birthday," "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," or a similar song to get a sense of how long to scrub. They'll probably have to sing it slowly (or more than once) to make it last 20 seconds.
- Rinse hands well under running water.
- Dry your hands using a paper towel or air dryer. If possible, use your paper towel to turn off the faucet.
- Always use soap and water if your hands are visibly dirty.
Soap and clean water are your best bet. But if they're not available – for example, when you're about to offer your child a snack at the park – use an alcohol-based hand rub to clean your hands. Alcohol-based hand rubs significantly reduce the number of germs on skin and are fast-acting.
Proper hand hygiene using an alcohol-based hand sanitizer
- Apply sanitizer to the palm of one hand.
- Rub hands together.
- Rub sanitizer over all surfaces of hands and fingers until hands are dry.
You can buy small bottles of hand sanitizer to carry with you, or buy large bottles and use to refill small bottles.
You can also make your own, which can be a fun activity to do with school-age kids. Search online for "make your own hand sanitizer" and you'll find lots of suggestions – but choose your recipe carefully.To be effective, a hand sanitizer must contain at least 60 percent alcohol.
Unfortunately, many of the recipes you'll find online contain much less alcohol or none at all. (For example, a cup of aloe vera plus 1 tablespoon of rubbing alcohol won't cut it. You'd need about two-thirds of a cup of alcohol to one-third cup of aloe vera.) But a quick Internet search will also turn up plenty of recipes that follow the 60-percent-or more rule.
Hand-washing history: The beginning of infection control
Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor, first demonstrated in the mid-1800s that "hand hygiene" can prevent the spread of disease. It's hard to imagine now, but at the time, people didn't know that germs caused disease and hand washing wasn't considered important.
Semmelweis worked in a hospital in Vienna where maternity patients were dying at such an alarming rate that they begged to be sent home. Most of the women were treated by student doctors who worked on corpses during an anatomy class before beginning their rounds in the maternity ward and didn't wash their hands in between.
Naturally, bacteria from the corpses were routinely transmitted to the mothers via the students' hands. The result was a death rate five times higher for mothers who delivered in one clinic of the hospital than for mothers who delivered at another clinic not attended by the student doctors. Semmelweis insisted that his students wash their hands before treating the mothers – and deaths on the maternity ward fell fivefold.
Today, hand washing is considered the most important tool in the healthcare worker's arsenal for preventing infection, but Semmelweis' pleas to make hand washing a standard practice throughout the hospital were mostly laughed at. Another 50 years would pass before the importance of hand washing as a preventive measure would be widely accepted by the medical profession.