Today, we don’t even need to think about washing our hands, it has become such basic practice that it’s almost second nature.  We have forgotten that not so long ago, when soap and clean running water were hard to come by, basic hygiene was a luxury, one that sometimes wasn’t even taken advantage of by those to whom it was available.  Medical institutions are perhaps the most important setting in which hand washing is implemented,  both patients and health care providers are susceptible to infection, especially since they are in constant contact with each other, and hand washing is instrumental to lowering the rates of infection.  In the 1850s, when this practice was not widely implemented, one hospital’s rate of infection decreased tenfold when hand washing was implemented.  The necessity of washing your hands is largely regarded as common knowledge now, but in many communities and, shockingly, in most healthcare institutions, acceptable levels of hand hygiene are achieved at a rate of under forty percent.  This should be incredibly surprising to you, people should be washing their hands in hospitals, and it’s almost outrageous that the standard of hygiene is so low.

In the past 45 years, the CDC and other corporations involved with disease control began to advocate heavily for hand washing.  Importantly, the CDC recommended that health care providers disinfect their hands between every operation with alcohol based sanitizer with 70 percent alcohol, and that they wash their hands as regularly as possible.  But these organizations can only do so much.  They can only really recommend procedures and perhaps raise awareness within the medical community that hand hygiene is really important.  But beyond that, enforcement of hand washing is difficult unless you can watch every doctor and nurse at all times.

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