Image source: cdc.gov
We have all been told a thousand times to wash our hands before we touch our food. Except for the germs, handwashing isn’t really bad for anybody. It’s obviously worth it if there are chances that you can stop the germs that cause diseases like diarrhoea and respiratory diseases from entering your system. It plays a major role in keeping a disease from spreading. It is important for general public but compulsory for people who work in the food and health industry. A study has also shown a greater increase in height of children below 5 years who washed their hands as compared to ones who didn’t.
This simple change in our style can bring down mortality rates down by about 50%. Getting all the vaccines and not helping yourself with these precautions isn’t effective at all. We can cut the number of casualties caused by diarrhoea to half and the ones caused by respiratory diseases by one-quarter. As important as it is to cultivate the habit of washing our hands for us, it is a lifesaving act for the doctors out there. If running water or soap is not available, you can use alcohol based hand washes. They are around a 100 times more effective than washing your hands with plain soap for 15 seconds.
- Plain soaps.
Plain soaps, even though used widely in normal households aren’t effective enough to be used in clinics. Though, they do perform the major role they are meant for. They can be used after all the general household works like using the toilet, when your hands are visibly dirty due to some reason, after eating, before eating, before and after changing nappies etc.
There are many such products that use natural ingredient to remove dirt from your skin.
- Liquid hand wash.
There are many organic ways to take care of your hands without letting harmful chemicals touch or enter your system like liquid hand washes. Their qualities are similar to those of plain soaps but they are in trend these days because they are a bit more hygienic than plain soap bars. This is because the soap is contained in a bottle and can’t be touched, thus protecting us from germs which could have entered our body by touching the soap someone else used. There are hand washes available that use only natural ingredients to do their work. They are also fragrant but don’t harm us even if we eat using the hands washed by them.
- Sanitizers:
We all know that bacteria are a bit larger in size than viruses. Viruses can get caught up in small cracks of skin. Bacteria can be removed from our skin by a little bit of good quality hand washing. A very large number of bacteria, virus and fungi can be killed using a sanitizer. If there is no visible soil present on our hands, then sanitizers are preferable. Sanitizers not only kill these microbes but also return the emollients back to our skin. The latest generation sanitizers you use, the healthier your skin becomes. Of course, they are better if available with natural ingredients.
- Hand scrubs:
Hand scrubs help in removing dead skin cells from our hands, which in turn result in more dead skin replacing it. Thus we give our skin a chance to grow better and healthier skin is produced.
Apart from maintaining hygiene, washing hands regularly and keeping them clean also helps them to be pretty and beautiful. There are many products available to ensure this. After all, hygiene is the basis for beauty!