Hand Hygiene

In 1795, the Scottish physician Alexander Gordon suggested that patients’ fevers were often the result of contagious processes and wrote that he believed that physicians (including himself) often carried this contagion to patients. Nearly 50 years later Sir Thomas Watson, a professor at King's College Hospital, London, who became president of the Royal College of Physicians, warned that colleagues who attended women with puerperal fever, a major cause of maternal mortality, were at risk for transmitting the disease to subsequent patients.  He suggested that practitioners rinse hands with chlorine solution and change clothing following interactions with infected patients to avoid spreading puerperal fever from one patient to the next.

The human body is home to more than 10,000 different microbes. Researchers with the NIH Microbiome Project say they've identified almost 99 percent of the microbes that live in and on the body. Many of these microbes are known pathogens, docile and peacefully coexisting with their neighbors. But healthcare workers (HCWs) know one thing to be true: those pathogens cannot be trusted. In the blink of an eye, pathogens can morph into the causative agents of healthcare-acquired infections (HAIs) and take a patient's life.

One of the best defenses against infectious disease is one of the most simple – handwashing. Still, despite years of global public awareness campaigns, handwashing rates remain low. Caregivers of young children in low-income, developing world settings are found to wash their hands only 17 percent of the time after using the toilet.

As part of the activities to support SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands Day on May 5, 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) is inviting healthcare facilities to participate in two global surveys.