Good hygiene behaviour can be contagious
Humans have shown great ingenuity in battling pathogens over centuries
I’ll bet you wash your hands more often and much more thoroughly than you used to. Me too. And that’s good. Not to make light of the coronavirus problem, since real people — including here in Canada — are suffering and dying from it, but along with avoiding undue panic and superfluous hoarding of toilet paper, we should remind ourselves that not all is dark.
The Citizen recently praised Canadian authorities for their handling of the public response to the crisis. Especially Ottawa’s medical officer of health, Dr. Vera Etches, for being highly visible and informative. Most of our politicians display enough sense to get out of the way and let knowledgeable experts take the lead.
That’s especially good. Given how polarized most of us are, I suspect that if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau released a video encouraging people to wash their hands with soap for as long as it takes to sing Happy Birthday, half of us would raise a dirty finger instead. But Ottawa Public Health tweeting that — hey, you can sing the chorus to Bryan Adams’ Heaven instead — has caused people to film themselves doing just that. What a sudsy hoot.
In the U.S., someone not affiliated with any official public health campaign or government body has created a web-based application that generates handwashing infographics based on your favourite songs. The site, washyourlyrics.com, is a brilliant example of how great humans can be when they mix good humour, ingenuity and civic-mindedness.
The good folks at @ottawahealth know how much I love them, but even with help from a Canadian cultural icon, they haven’t so far been able to match the viral genius of the Vietnamese officials who came up with a washyour-hands video so catchy it led to a TikTok dance challenge and won the internet for the week.
The Vietnamese ditty might turn out to be as memorable as the 2012 Dumb
Ways to Die Australian public safety campaign which I — and my kids — can still sing to this day. Who said social media was useless?
Diseases and pathogens making humans sick and killing them have been around since the invention of humans. But our response to them has evolved over the centuries. Whereas being stricken with something dreadful used to be considered a sign of moral decrepitude to be treated with a rigorous application of prayer, we’ve slowly evolved to develop isolation and quarantine procedures to limit the spread of contagion and, crucially, implemented public sanitation measures that raised the whole species out of the germ-infested gutter.
As the Institute of Medicine (U.S.) Committee for the Study of the Future of Public Health explains in its comprehensive historical review of public health through the ages, sanitation “changed the way society thought about public responsibility for citizens’ health. Protecting health became a social responsibility. Disease control continued to focus on epidemics, but the manner of controlling turned from quarantine and isolation of the individual to cleaning up and improving the common environment . ... With sanitation, public health became a societal goal and protecting health became a public activity.”
What’s more, we’re all becoming more aware of our own individual responsibility to protect ourselves and our immediate environment by adopting simple measures such as, yes, washing our hands, sneezing into our elbows, avoiding crowds if our immune system is compromised, working from home when possible if we’re feeling under the weather, and so on. As the Citizen noted, in Ottawa “businesses and consumers are showing leadership, too. A retailer takes extra care to disinfect shopping carts; local businesses develop travel guidelines for employees; fist-bumps replace handshakes.”
Public schools also inform parents that they’ve upped their cleaning-and-disinfecting game since little kids aren’t especially keen on hygiene, as you’ll know if you’ve ever met a seven-yearold in the wild.
COVID-19 is no joke. But our reaction to it, especially here in Canada, shows us we can learn and improve, making whatever bug threatens us next less deadly because of it. There is light in that dreadful tunnel.
Brigitte Pellerin is an Ottawa writer.