By KATHERINE SNOW SMITH
Published September 21, 2003
Was that your son at the Atlanta Braves baseball game who used the restroom, then didn't wash his hands? Or maybe when you breezed through Grand Central Station on your New York trip,your daughter committed the same unsanitary crime? Or even worse - was it you?
Results from a study that "spied" on bathroom users at five public restrooms across the country found that one in three of us do not wash our hands before leaving those restrooms. And in other shocking news on the scintillating topic of dirty hands, another study has concluded that over-the-counter antibacterial soaps and cleaning products don't keep our hands any cleaner than the basic brands.
"Despite increased publicity over the past several years about the importance of basic hand washing in limiting the spread of infectious disease, men and women in several American cities are even less likely to wash today than they were four years ago," reports the Web site www.washup.org which cited the results of the spying or as they call it "observational studies" conducted by the American Society of Microbiology's Clean Hands Campaign.
Though this study was conducted three years ago, the Clean Hands Campaign is ongoing as are other efforts to increase hand washing by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, public school systems nationwide and the CNMADOA. (That's the collective informal group of all us Constantly Nagging Moms and Dads of America.)
No matter how much we remind our kids to wash up or how much our parents reminded us, about a third of us still don't listen. And that's in public restrooms. I bet even fewer people always wash their hands after every visit to their bathroom at home.
The public restrooms that were observed were at the Navy Pier in Chicago, the Treasure Chest Casino in New Orleans, Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, an Atlanta Braves baseball game in Atlanta and Grand Central and Penn stations in New York. Observers discreetly watched and recorded whether 7,836 people using those restrooms washed their hands. New York had the dirtiest hands with only 49 percent of the bathroom users washing up afterward while the Chicagoans were the cleanest with 83 percent washing their hands. Across the five cities, 75 percent of the women observed washed their hands compared with 58 percent of the men.
The American Society of Microbiology also conducted a telephone survey about hand washing and found what we say and do can differ. While the observational study found just 67 percent of people actually wash their hands in the restroom, when asked, 95 percent of people surveyed said they do. Seventy-eight percent said they wash their hands after changing a diaper and 77 percent said they wash up before eating or handling food.
Only 31 percent said they wash their hands after coughing or sneezing.
The Society of Microbiology stresses that a simple thing like washing hands regularly can really help control the spread of infections, which cuts down on the use of antibiotics that lose their potency over time as bacteria develop resistance to them.
Dr. Elaine Larson, professor of pharmaceutical research at Columbia University's School of Nursing in New York, is certainly all for washing hands regularly but says we don't need antibacterial soap to get them clean. She recently headed a research team that studied 238 families for a year. Half used regular soaps while the other half used antibacterial soaps, household cleaners and detergents. The researchers cultured the hands of the primary care provider in the family every three months.
"At the end of the year we found no difference in the bacterial count of the people who used the antibacterial products. But everybody had cleaner hands after a year than they did at the beginning because they were more conscious of washing their hands," Larson said. Antibacterial soaps used in hospitals, of course, can kill more germs, she added.
While there are some urban myths circulating that over-the counter antibacterial soap can actually rid the body of necessary "good" bacteria, that's not true. "There is no evidence that it does any harm," Larson said, adding that the antibacterial soap has helped curtail infections in some military studies looking at open wounds or boils.
While we're on things that fall into the category of gross, if you have diarrhea, a throw-up bug, the flu or other sickness in your family, Larson suggested using a waterless, alcohol-based product such as Purell.
"The advantage is you don't need to run to a sink. If somebody spits up on you on an airplane, it's right there," she said. "The alcohol works faster than regular or antibacterial soap." (I now keep a bottle at the changing table.)
As for regular hand washing, the friction created by rubbing hands together is as important as the soap. "Soap doesn't really kill very many organisms, it multiplies them and makes them easier to rinse off. The main effect is mechanical," Larson told me. We should try to rub our hands together under the water for 10 to 15 seconds. And if you're somewhere with no soap or water, just rubbing your hands together or on a leaf gets them cleaner.
So if you're at a Texaco station on Interstate 95 and the soap is as dirty as the ring around the toilet bowl, is it better to just rub your hands together? She said use the soap but run it under water a bit first. But because a gooey soap dish can be a medium for growing bacteria, she likes bottled soap more. And try to change your hand towels when they get really damp and every day if somebody in the house is sick. Sick or not, we should change kitchen towels every day.
While hand washing can cut down on the number of times we go to the pediatrician's office every year, we still don't need to be obsessed with scrubbing and scrubbing every half hour. Or, as Larson put it: "We don't want a bunch of Lady Macbeths."
- You can reach Katherine Snow Smith by e-mail at snowsmith@verizon.net or write Rookie Mom, St. Petersburg Times, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731.
