Why do we wash our hands every day? A look into the history of hygiene and a doctor’s opinion

It would seem that handwashing is an entirely familiar ritual of personal hygiene. Nowadays, it is hard to imagine a person who would deny the importance of this action, especially during epidemics and pandemics.

The need to wash hands was discovered by people not so long ago, only at the end of the XIX century. And the doctor, whose name later went down in history as the first to prove the importance of this procedure, ended up in a psychiatric hospital for his statements.

Let’s find out why it is important to wash hands and when it was accepted by the public.

History of the origin and development of hygiene

Hungarian doctor Ignaz Zemmelweis proved the importance of hand washing in 1847. The fact is that in the hospital where the doctor worked, there was an outbreak of postpartum fever, which caused the death of about 40% of patients. Semmelweis found out that the cause of the disease was an infection similar to the one that can appear in surgeons after working with the autopsy of corpses.

It turned out that the doctors who examined the pregnant women carried the infection to them just after working in the morgue, because they did not carry out the appropriate disinfection.

After conducting an experiment, Semmelweis concluded that cadaver particles left on doctors’ hands were to blame for the spread of infection. That is why he proposed to introduce a new rule – treatment of hands with bleach. After that, the mortality rate in the doctor’s department decreased by almost 90% in one year.

However, strangely enough, the discovery of Zemmelweis was not positively perceived by colleagues. The medical community in every way denied the truthfulness of the doctor’s discovery and accused him of lying. As a result, at the age of 47, the doctor was sent to a psychiatric hospital, where he ended his life.

It was only at the beginning of the 20th century that society returned to the discovery of Semmelweis, after Louis Pasteur had laid the foundations of microbiology and the first steps towards the invention of antibiotics had begun. It was only in 1906 that the medical community recognized the mistake of its ancestors: a posthumous monument with the inscription “Savior of the World” was erected to the Hungarian doctor on the donations of his colleagues from all over the world.

The doctor’s opinion

researcher at the Saratov Research Center for Hygiene of the Federal Biomedical University of Saratov

“Modern doctors do not cease to confirm the importance of hand washing. I will tell you about the significance of this type of personal hygiene”.

Compliance with the rules of personal hygiene, including hand washing, is one of the main ways of nonspecific prevention of a number of bacterial and viral infections. More than 300 infectious diseases result from neglecting this habit.

Regular hand washing can reduce by more than 30% the risk of diseases with fecal-oral transmission (dysentery, typhoid fever, worm infections, ascariasis, enterobiasis, respiratory syncytial infections, etc.), including COVID-19, which has recently become the most important.

More than 800 representatives of various flora can accumulate on human hands, 90% of which are resident (permanent), permanently present in various layers of the epidermis and not dangerous. The remaining 10% of microflora refers to transient, that is, obtained as a result of human contact with environmental objects, including other people.

It is in this 10% that pathogenic flora, which is the cause of a wide range of diseases, is usually included. Some studies have shown that a person (especially children) on average about 300 times a day touches the mucous membranes of the eyes, mouth and nose with their hands, which are the entry gates of various pathogens.

The main purpose of regular hand washing is to prevent potentially harmful microorganisms and viruses from reaching the mucous membranes through contaminated hand skin.

How many times you should wash your hands

There are recommendations according to which it is necessary to wash hands five or six times a day, but this number is conditional. In order to reduce the risk of infection with various diseases, it is necessary to do this before each meal and its preparation, after contact with various objects in public transportation, with door handles, with animals, after handshakes.

It should be noted that during the various pandemics it is recommended to wash hands twice with soap and water, as the first time washes off about 50% of pathogenic flora, and the second time – 90%, which significantly prevents the risk of infection.