Bacteria, Viruses, and Washing Your Hands

By: Kathleen Murray, Capstone Client Advocate, February 2014

This past week our office was running on a skeleton crew, we all were passing around this nasty virus. It knocked out all but five people on our staff in one day. This motivated me to educate my fellow employees and our clients on how to stop the spread of bacteria. My research discovered that prevention and hand washing were on the top of the list.

Think about your company break room, ours is beautiful. It has everything you need to make a good lunch besides an actual stove. We have a microwave, refrigerator, water dispenser, toaster, toaster oven etc. All of these surfaces are a breeding ground for bacteria if people are not properly washing their hands. Every person in our office at some point in the day comes in contact with so many germs. The problem is spread by touching common surfaces like those in our break room, door handles, light switches and common phones.

The first thing that comes to mind when people are sick is to make sure to wash hands their hands often. According to the CDC, hands need to be washed for several reasons, preparing food, caring for the sick, after using the bathroom, etc. For a complete list of reasons to wash your hands visit Here

Most important is to wash your hands properly. Some people don’t know how to wash their hands properly and are actually making matters worse. It is recommended to wet, lather, scrub, rinse, dry. How we scrub is key to removing harmful bacteria.

1. Rub palm to palm.
2. Rub Palm over back of hand, fingers interlaced.
3. Palm to palm fingers interlaced
4. Fingers interlocked into palm.
5. Rotations rubbing of thumb clasped into palm.
6. Rotational rubbing of clasped fingers into palm.
7. Rinse, followed by dry hands thoroughly

For more information on how to properly wash your hands visit Here

There is also this great debate on hand sanitizer and if it actually works. Antibacterial hand sanitizers are marketed to the public as an effective way to “wash hands”. Waterless products are popular among parents because little hands get into a lot of things when in public and a sink and soap is not always readily available. Manufacturers of hand sanitizers claim that the sanitizers kill 99.9 percent of germs; however, recent research suggests that this is not the case. Hand sanitizers work by stripping away the outer layer of oil on the skin. It is consistently recommended that the best method is to wash hands the old fashion way.

We hope that our staff has become more aware of hand washing skills and that we can try and prevent the spread of illness by proper hand washing techniques. By the way, are you looking at this article on your cell phone? If you are you should know cell phones contain roughly 25,000 germs. Gross, right? Be on the lookout for more on this topic in my next Insight, “Where Germs Lurk”