Health of the community is in all of our hands
OUR hands do incredible work but can also be the cause of illness if not kept clean.
Observing World Hand Hygiene Day yesterday, the provincial health department said regular hand washing, like hand hygiene, plays an important role in maintaining your health and the health of those around you.
“Covid-19 has shown us the importance of hand hygiene, it is one of the non-pharmaceutical interventions of preventing the spread of the virus.
“Washing hands can keep you healthy and prevent the spread of respiratory and diarrhoeal infections from one person to the next.”
Germs can spread from other people or surfaces when one:
Touches your eyes, nose, and mouth with unwashed hands.
Prepares or eats food and drinks with unwashed hands.
Touches a contaminated surface or objects.
Blows your nose, coughs, or sneezes into your hands and then touches other people’s hands or common objects.
The latest global survey of the World Health Organization (WHO) on implementation of national infection prevention and control programmes highlights the urgent need to reduce inequalities in the availability of good hand hygiene and other infection prevention and control measures between high- and lower-income countries.
“Good hand hygiene is also vital in preventing any infections acquired in health care, the spread of antimicrobial resistance and other emerging health threats,” WHO said.
“Infection acquired during healthcare delivery is a major global health problem, but patients in low- and middle-income countries are twice as likely to experience this as patients in high-income countries (15% and 7% of patients respectively); the risk in intensive care units (ICUs), especially among newborns, is between two and 20 times higher. One reason for this is that in some low-income countries, only one in 10 health workers practises proper hand hygiene while caring for patients at high risk of health-careassociated infections in ICU – often because they simply do not have the facilities to do so.”