How frequently have you been told to wash your hands in a day? Parents or teachers keep telling kids to wash their hands regularly to maintain a clean and healthy way of life. We frequently suffer from colds, flu and other bacterial infections which prevent us from doing our day-to-day tasks in a normal way. Kids or even adults come in contact with bacteria or germs while studying in a school or college, working in an office, playing with friends and even using a public toilets or transport, which can enter your body and damage your immune system. To avoid these health irregularities, people try to keep their hands clean, which can easily exterminate common diseases, like cold and flu viruses, and help you stay fit and healthy for your routine work.
As we come in contact with different people and objects all through the day, we tend to accumulate germs in our hands. These germs can easily infect us, as soon as we touch our eyes, nose or mouth. Though, it’s not possible to keep our hands germfree all the time, still we can check the transmission of bacteria, viruses and other microbes by washing our hands at regular intervals.
Now the question arises when and how should we wash our hands. We should always wash our hands before cooking food, treating wounds, giving medicine, attending a sick or injured person and inserting or removing contact lenses; and after preparing food, especially meat or poultry products, using the toilet, changing a diaper, feeding or touching an animal or waste, blowing our nose, coughing or sneezing into our hands, treating wounds or attending a sick or injured person, disposing garbage, household or garden chemicals and any other contaminated objects, like washing cloth or cleaning soiled shoes. In short, we should wash our hands every time they appear dirty.
To remove all the bacteria and germs from our hands, you should wash your hands in a proper manner. You should always wash hands with sop and warm water. All you need to do is soak your hands with warm running water to apply soap (liquid, bar or powder), now rub your hands to lather up for 15-20 seconds while cleaning all the parts, together with nails, fingers, palms, back of your hands and wrists, then rinse your hands until soap is removed completely and dry your hands with a clean towel or paper towel. And make sure you turn the faucet off with a towel after washing the hands. In case, there is no water or soap to wash hands, you also can use a antiseptic hand sanitizer, as sanitizers can remove 99.99% of germs from your hands without the need of water or soap.