Keeping those hands clean

Throbbing headaches and body aches. Festering sores. Food poisoning and the hurricane it sends into your stomach.

These maladies, from the flu, staph infections, salmonella and other illnesses that can brew up a miserable day, can often be prevented if you'll just wash your hands, says Dr. Michael Jelinek, infectious disease specialist in Edinburg, Texas.

“Hand-washing, even with nonantibacterial soap, is probably the best method of preventing the spread of most diseases,” he said. Other diseases commonly spread through lack of hand-washing are: hepatitis A, the common cold, influenza, strep infections and salmonella. It's extremely important to wash your hands before eating and after using the restroom. To be especially safe, you might even want to wash your hands before using the restroom.

Hospitals, Jelinek said, have waterless hand-cleaning systems between patients' rooms; they are used before and after nurses and physicians enter those rooms.

“I probably use them upwards of 70 times a day,” he said with a laugh. “All the hospitals have anonymous monitors who monitor who washes their hands and who doesn't. That's part of infection control.”

The nurses at Valley Ear, Nose, and Throat Specialists in Weslaco, Texas, wash their hands numerous times throughout the day.

“Every time we're out of a room with a patient, we wash our hands,” said Marianne Silva, a nurse. “It's important because, if you don't wash your hands, and you just handled a patient who has an infection, or is running some kind of fever, and you go into another room and start talking or seeing another patient and you have contact with that patient, the patient is at risk of getting that same infection.”

The practice of hand-washing was strongly promoted by Joseph Lister at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary in the late 19th century. Previously, however, Ignaz Semmelweis, an Austrian Hungarian physician, had found that hand washing by medical personnel reduced the mortality rate of new mothers. American physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. also recommended the practice.

Jelinek said the most common disease he has seen that could be reduced through hand-washing is MRSA, of which there are two types: hospital or nursing-home acquired variety, and the community acquired variety which is much more aggressive.

“You don't have to have a wound or even a scratch,” he said of the community variety. “It can invade intact skin. Say somebody in this setting, where they go to an exercise club, where they work out on the weight machine and they perspire, and their perspiration contains bacteria. Somebody else comes and uses the same equipment and they can get infected that way. Hand-washing and cleaning the equipment between each person's use is important.”

A typical scenario, he said, will involve a patient with a big boil on the skin.

“They say, 'It started off as a little bump, and I thought it was just a little pimple or something, but it hurt so much I thought it might be a spider bite and it's not a spider bite,” he said. “It starts off as a very small red pimple that becomes excruciatingly painful. It has a significant impact on school and work, because generally these people have a painful infection and they're in too much discomfort to go to school or work.”

Much of this could be prevented, he said, by just washing hands. You also can use

the waterless alcohol-based hand sanitizers.

“Any hand-washing of any type is better than no hand-washing,” he said.