This is so true.
I do this all of the time and cannot reacall the last time
that I got sick from the flu or cold.
I washed my hand so many times.
Keep some cream on hand.
The hands get very dry.
But it is worth it.
Teach the children when they come home from school etc.
This is very good adviced.
Cold and flu season is here, filling the streets with a great chorus of coughing, dripping, hacking, sniffling humanity. And there's one cheap, easy, clinically proven way to avoid joining them.
Wash your hands.

Here's the drill: Scrub vigorously with water and soap until lather appears, making sure to get between your fingers and fingernails. Use a nail brush if you have one. Briskly dry with a towel.

Do it often and you'll stay a lot healthier — 24% less like to get a respiratory illness and 45% to 50% less likely to get a stomach bug, the World Health Organization says.


BETTER LIFE: Tips for fighting flu

Hand washing "has a huge health impact," says Anna Bowen, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Water is not the most important part, it's "the friction and duration. You really need to scrub vigorously for about 20 seconds."

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Still not convinced?

"Eighty percent of infections are transported by touch, so hand washing is the No. 1 thing you can to do prevent infection," says Michael Smith, WebMD's chief medical editor in Atlanta.

And not just when you're leaving the restroom.

"Take the opportunity to take a hand-washing break," Smith says. "Any time you're touching something that other people frequently touch, it's a good time to wash your hands."

Not that we do. According to an American Society for Microbiology survey in 2007, 92% of Americans say they always wash after using a public restroom. But when researchers actually watched, it turned out only 83% did.

Barely. When people wash their hands, only 33% use soap and only 16% adequately wash. The average hand-washing time was a pathetic 11 seconds, says Charles Peter Gerba, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Popular alcohol hand gels aren't as effective as soap and water, but they're better than nothing, Smith says.

Soap and water help dislodge dirt, bacteria and viruses so they "can go down the drain," he says. With gels, "the bacteria has nowhere to go."

On the other hand, don't buy the hype about antibacterial soap. There's little evidence it's any more effective.

Paper or blower?

Then there's the question of how to dry newly washed hands.

Air dryers first became popular in the 1970s and were developed to reduce paper waste, save energy and cut maintenance costs. But consumers didn't like them, and today they're in only 6% of public restrooms in the USA, according to the consumer research company Mintel.

Which works better, paper towels or dryers, is hotly debated.

Doug Powell, a professor of food safety at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan., says numerous papers show that the friction created by using paper towels is actually a key part of the cleaning process. The friction "removes the bacteria, whereas blow dryers tend to disperse them in the air," he says.

A study by the Mayo Clinic in 2000 found that four potential drying methods — paper towel, cloth roller towel, warm-forced-air dryer and "spontaneous room air evaporation" — were all about equal in removing bacteria.