With so many kids going back to school, it’s a great time to remind everyone of the importance of washing their hands.
Who better to teach a hand-washing lesson to kids than kids themselves? Let’s see what these kids have to say.
Share the video with kids you know. Help them understand the importance of washing their hands the right way – “The GlitterBug Way.”
The world’s eyes have been focused on Rio since the Olympic Games opened on August 5. With Brazil having been in the news this year because of a massive Zika outbreak, it’s no surprise many have been concerned for the health of Olympic athletes and spectators alike. Health officials, however, aren’t concerned with a big risk for spread of the virus.
Why?
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), Zika is classified as ‘low risk’ among health concerns surrounding the Olympics. It’s winter in Brazil, so mosquitoes (whose bites are believed to be the primary method Zika spreads) aren’t as much of a concern as they would be in warmer months. Additionally, with authorities working to kill off and control mosquito populations, the number of new cases recorded has steadily declined for months.
Meanwhile, influenza is listed as being ‘high risk,’ as it’s flu season in Brazil. John McConnell, editor of Lancet Infectious Diseases, said, “People are much more likely to go home carrying flu than Zika virus, and flu is a much more dangerous disease.” With all the press coverage about Zika it’s important to remember that in the United States, Zika has killed one person, whereas the flu kills more than 30,000 people each year.
The best way to avoid the flu, aside from getting a flu vaccine, is to practice good health habits such as thorough and frequent hand washing. Proper hand hygiene remains one of the best ways to protect yourself and your family from getting sick.
Here’s to all the Olympic athletes and spectators who will soon be traveling to their homes from Rio! We hope you had a memorable time, and we hope you remember to wash your hands!
Sources:
http://www.vox.com/2016/7/20/12209168/2016-rio-olympics-zika-virus-health-risks
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/protect/habits.htm
Image source:
https://pixabay.com/en/circles-olympics-olympic-games-blue-1573621/
Having clean hands is always important, but using soap and water isn’t always practical. In hospital and other patient care situations, as health care workers move from one patient to another, a soap-and-water washing doesn’t always contribute to overall time-effectiveness.
Hand sanitizer (also referred to as alcohol-based handrub) is a well-researched, efficacious product which is considered to fulfill the highest standards of safety in regards to infection prevention. Its creation and widespread availability has revolutionized modern hand hygiene practices.
If you use hand sanitizer, GlitterBug Gel is a great product for you. It teaches and evaluates the effectiveness of how hand sanitizer is applied. It looks and feels like sanitizer, and though it’s 60% alcohol, it doesn’t kill germs. Simply apply as you would regular hand sanitizer, and check under the light. Any glowing areas on your hands indicate a thorough application of sanitizer.
Watch this quick video to see how it’s done:
Use GlitterBug Gel to help you see how well your hand sanitizer is working.
Source: http://www.who.int/gpsc/tools/faqs/system_change/en/
With summer in full swing you’ve probably attended a picnic or two. Don’t let the great outdoors leave you vulnerable to germs and infection. Here are 4 tips to have a healthy summer picnic:
Keep cold food cold. Use gel packs or ice in your cooler to keep cold food at or below 40 ℉ and prevent the growth of bacteria.
Keep hot food hot. When grilling, cook your food thoroughly and keep it hot until serving. You may want to bring your food thermometer: the safe temperature for ground beef is 160 ℉, and for chicken it’s 165 ℉.
Make sure all food prep and eating surfaces are clean. Use disinfecting wipes to clean tables and chairs. Keep plates and utensils clean, and avoid cross-contamination while preparing food.
Have everyone wash their hands! Before preparing and eating food (and after touching most anything outdoors) simple soap and clean water from a jug will do for an outdoor handwashing. Moist towelettes are also a good option.
Hand-washing remains the most effective prevention against the spread of germs in home and community settings. For extra confidence in your family’s hand-washing abilities, use GlitterBug Gel or Potion, and help everyone enjoy the rest of a safe, healthy summer.
Source: http://www.fda.gov/Food/ResourcesForYou/Consumers/ucm109899.htm
Germs hide in the strangest places.
So make sure you always wash your hands well, and use Brevis products to ensure your hands are clean!
|
(Post and credit for facts: health.state.mn.us/handhygiene)
Learning to wash your hands the right way is no laughing matter. Jimmy Kimmel wanted to make sure he was doing it right, so he reached out to Dr. Poland from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, who is a specialist in infectious disease.
Check the video out below, and then CLICK HERE to look at all the GLITTERBUG kits that can help ensure you are washing your hands correctly too!
TRANSIENT MICROBES
Skin is our first line of defense against invasions that can cause illness, but skin – especially the skin ON our hands – can also transport countless microorganisms.
Our hands are incredibly versatile. We use them to push, pull, grab, and hold things. Because of this they are constantly picking up and depositing transient microbes. Our hands then become carriers of a diversity of microbes, some of which can cause us harm. We grant many of them access into our bodies when we touch the food we eat, our eyes, noses and mouths. Transient germs live primarily on the surface of the skin and can easily be transferred. The good news is that you can remove them with proper handwashing or render them harmless with hand sanitizer. Washing your hands frequently is the best way to prevent spreading them. Below are a few of the more common culprits
We’ve all been there: You have to “go” and you’re nowhere near home so you have a choice: shame yourself or (gasp!) use a public restroom. So you consult a phone app to find the closest clean restroom (yes, there are several apps) and enroute to your designated clean loo you strategize how to get your business done and come out unscathed. How do you get IN or OUT of the restroom without touching the door handle, for instance? Do you use your elbow? Do you grab a tissue or moist wipe from the pack you always keep handy? Same goes for the stall door. And what if the seat is in the wrong position? You can always employ the squat-and-hover method and flush the toilet with your foot.
Discussing the variations is like watching a skit on Saturday Night Live. Let’s say you flushed the toilet with your foot. Well, that means the next person might use their hands and whatever was on your shoe is now on their hands. And vice versa. You used a paper towel to open the door, but there’s no garbage to dispose of the now dirty towel…so where do you put it? And let’s say you placed your handbag or backpack on the hook on the stall door, but what was on the hook before you got there? Because you may be taking it with you. It’s a vicious cycle. Is there a solution?
After one of the largest handwashing surveys in the UK revealed some “deplorable habits” recently, a company there launched a product to promote hand hygiene and shame bad hygiene by displaying rates on screens in bathrooms. The product was piloted across different types of businesses such as education, office and retail facilities as well as other sectors where good hand hygiene is essential—and the company claims the “informal nudge” and increased peer pressure helped drive good behavior rates up dramatically. “Hand washing rates rose to 90 per cent within two days of the data being displayed, before stabilising between 80 per cent and 85 per cent.”
Of course, we never tire of handwashing discussions around here. Now, another new survey from restroom fixture manufacturer Bradley Corporation has gone and given us more fodder by covering the actions many of us take to avoid touching anything in a restroom. Sounds oddly familiar and we’re not alone: 57% of people using public restrooms operate the flusher with their foot; 55% use paper towels with the door handle; 45% open and close the door with behind (we assume that’s a hip or bum); and 69% of people use their elbows to avoid all contact in a public restroom.
We look forward to a world where 100% of respondents are washing their hands, but in the meantime we’ll take an increase in people using paper towels, elbows, feet and bums, too. Of course, there’s always room for improvement when it comes to the state of public restrooms. In fact, an unpleasant restroom experience can create a damaging and lasting impression for a business—and that’s bad for business. According to the Bradley survey, the majority of consumers believe an unclean restroom indicates poor management (69%), lowers their opinion of the company (67% ) and signifies that the business doesn’t care about customers (63%).
Which brings us to another improvement we’re thrilled to see in the business of taking care of our business: clean public restroom apps. There are several out there and we’re not making a recommendation, but it can’t be worse than going to a public restroom without some kind of head’s up.
Is requiring food workers to wash their hands after using the bathroom an onerous government intrusion? Senator Thom Tillis of North Carollina thinks so.
During a recent appearance at the Bipartisan Policy Center, Senator Tillis stated that businesses are bogged down by government regulations, so he thinks restaurants should be able to opt-out of the requirement that employees wash their hands after using the restroom—as long as they let customers know.
Tillis told the story of a time a woman asked him if hand washing wasn’t the sort of regulation that needed to be on the books. With his right hand raised for emphasis, Tillis concluded that in his example most businesses who posted signs telling customers their food workers didn’t have to wash their hands would likely go out of business. Tillis’s example takes pressure off businesses to provide safe food, and forces consumers to judge every meal’s likelihood of making them violently ill. Ah, the free market!
In case you didn’t know, the FDA requires handwashing and here’s why: “Proper handwashing reduces the spread of fecal-oral pathogens from the hands of a food employee to foods.” Gross! Recently, a restaurant in Mercer County, New Jersey was cited for handwashing violations—just a month before a worker tested positive for hepatitis A. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says hepatitis A is spread when an infected person doesn’t wash his or her hands after going to the bathroom and touches other objects or food.
In 2013, an All American Grill in Tillis’s home state gave a hundred people salmonella. The health department identified several health violations that could have contributed to food cross-contamination, including the fact that the hand washing sink was out of paper towels and soap, and didn’t have sufficiently hot water, all factors that “could serve as a deterrent to hand washing or render it ineffective,” according to the department. In that situation that market didn’t take care of the safety risks—100 ill guests and employees did.
Tillis was the butt of a lot of jokes after his comments went public. Jon Stewart even did this segment “Mr. Unclean,” on The Daily Show. Says Stewart, “You do realize that that’s a regulation too, right? … That’s not getting rid of a regulation, that just makes you an inconsistent ideologue with a light fecal dusting in your latte.”
Telling people to wash their hands never gets old around here. If workers are serving food and not washing their hands, they’re also serving up germs and sickness. So if free-market ideology means we can’t go out to eat without worrying about getting sick we’ll just stay home for dinner.
Handwashing assist or foul? We all follow in the footsteps, handprints—and germs—of everyone who has gone before us. (Not to mention the stranger who is sitting next to us right now.)
Handwashing pundits know proper handwashing is the most effective way to kill those germs and prevent the spread of illness, so we’re launching a new project—a social, visual declaration to all of mankind that we MUST wash our hands: #handhygienx.
To encourage the handwashing-averse or neglectful public to get on board, we’re leveraging picture and video sharing on social media to collectively capture handwashing habits—be it assists or fouls—through the lens of the camera/phone-wielding public. This project isn’t just for infection control specialists, germophobes, or epidemiologists (although they’ll love it). It’s a campaign is for all of mankind; we humans who work, play, eat, shop, learn, touch, breathe, and live in the mire of life every day.
All things will be at play here, including (and hopefully) the good stuff. We’d love to see people washing their hands correctly or wearing gloves when appropriate; businesses that post encouraging handwashing signs; stores making disinfecting wipes readily available; maybe even videos of adults washing their hands while they sing the ABC song twice through (or the equivalent of the required 20-seconds it takes to kill germs). If it’s for the good of all mankind, share it.
The bad (unfortunately) will also be at play, from man-on-the street nose pickers to woman-on-the-street “free” sneezers. See a restaurant worker leaving the restroom without washing his or herhands? Capture it. Handwash hygienx will put a spotlight on all of the contaminators and cross-contaminators out there in society. You know who they are and it’s time to shame them.
The rules are SIMPLE: When you see a handwashing hygienx (good or foul), snap a picture with your mobile device and upload it to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ with the hashtag: #handhygienx.
If you’re not a social media user, you’re welcome to email photos to saralynn@brevis.com and we’ll share it on our Brevis Instagram page and other social sites. We’ve added samples of hand hygienx photos to our official project page, and we’ll maintain a running collection as the project goes along.
Citizens of project #handhygienx unite! Help us spot the handwashing fair and foul, fight the germs, and live healthier lives all around on planet earth.