How to Wash Hands to Prevent (H1N1) Swine Flu

We’ve all heard the advice that you should wash hands frequently to prevent colds and flu, but now that the Swine flu has become a flu pandemic, it has become even more important. When the practice of hand washing began in a Vienna hospital over 150 years ago, women were dying at an alarming rate in one specific hospital maternity ward. It seems that medical students were going from an anatomy class where they were working on cadavers directly to attending to rounds with the maternity patients. Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis conducted an experiment by insisting that the medical students first wash their hands before attending to the women in the maternity ward. Once the medical students began hand washing, the death rate in the maternity ward fell by 5 times and the practice of washing hands before and after contact with a patient became the new standard. So that's how the practice of washing hands began, but how do you know that you are washing hands effectively to prevent the flu? Read on to learn the CDC’s defined practices of the proper way to wash hands. Hand sanitizing should be used in lieu of hand washing when clean water and soap are not available.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Clean warm water
• Soap
• Hand sanitizer

1. 

   Use warm water whenever possible and wet hands with clean warm water. Apply soap and rub hands together making sure that you lather and scrub all surfaces. Getting hands to effectively suds up is extremely important to effective hand washing.

2. 

   Continue rubbing hands together for at least 15-20 seconds. Some good rules of thumb are to imagine singing either “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” or “Happy Birthday” twice in your head to make sure that you’ve continued long enough. Rinse hands well under warm water.

3. 

   Dry your hands using a clean paper towel or air dryer. If possible, turn off the faucet with a paper towel. It is best not to touch the faucet directly with your clean hands. If you are leaving a public restroom, try to open the door to exit with a paper towel and toss it as you are leaving, without touching the door handle directly with your clean hands.

4. 

   Use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer, such as purell hand sanitizer, when clean water and soap are not available. It is also important that hand sanitizing is done correctly. Squeeze some hand sanitizer into the palm of one hand. Rub your hands together so that the hand sanitizer is rubbed over all surfaces of hands and fingers until they are dry.

Tips & Warnings

• Consider getting the flu vaccine to greatly reduce your chances of getting the flu.
• It is best to wash hands before eating, before preparing food, after handling uncooked meat and poultry, after coughing, sneezing, or blowing one's nose, after changing diapers, and after using the bathroom.
• The flu vaccination may prevent some of the serious infections of the flu virus.

Resources

• How to Get Your Child Vaccinated for (H1N1) Swine Flu
• CDC Hand Washing Guide

[solutionsforu]

on 11/10/2009 Good article on How to Wash Hands to Prevent (H1N1) Swine Flu. very informative and helpful

[LS01]

on 11/10/2009 Thanks for the helpful info. 5* and a rec.