Concord Monitor.
Editorial

Okay, we'll cut right to the disgusting chase. In 2008, Charles Gerba, a University of Arizona microbiologist with a penchant for studying public restrooms, reported that the cleanest surface in the facilities is the toilet seat. The dirtiest - home to fecal coliform, salmonella and staphylococcus bacteria, cold and flu viruses and other pathogens? The floor. One third of all the women's purses Gerba tested had fecal coliform bacteria on their bottoms. His message to women? Use the hook.

In another recent study of 404 British commuters reported on by Tara Parker Pope in the New York Times, researchers found that 28 percent of those tested had fecal bacteria on their hands. The biggest offenders were men. A whopping 57 percent of them had hands that shouldn't touch their own eyes, nose or mouth, let alone anyone else's. The news made us wonder. This is the 21st century, right?

With the flu season approaching and at least two strains circulating, a publicity campaign has been launched by the federal Centers for Disease Control, schools and other institutions and employers. The message is simple. Wash your hands, and do it well and often. If soap and water aren't available, use an alcohol-based hand washing gel.

Frequent hand washing, epidemiologists say, is the single best way to guard against getting the flu. A University of California Berkeley study that filmed students as they worked on their laptops found that on average, they touched their eyes, nose or lips once every four minutes. That means a bacteria or virus lurking on their hands had 15 opportunities per hour to infect them.

About one-third of flu infections are believed to be caused by viruses transmitted by one's hands.

Another study, done at the University of Colorado and described by Pope, found that in dorms where hand sanitizers were made readily available and hand washing stressed, students got sick 20 percent less than in the other dorms. And in homes with hand sanitizers, the risk that someone else would become ill because a child had a gastrointestinal illness fell by 60 percent.

Any washing is better than none, but to be effective, the CDC says, hands should be soaped and rubbed together for 15 to 20 seconds making sure to scrub every surface, and then dried with hot air or a paper towel that should, the agency advised, then be used to turn off the water.

In 1850, before the germ theory of disease existed, Ignaz Semmelweis, a Viennese physician noted something unusual in his hospital. The mothers who delivered babies in one maternity ward died five times more often than those in other wards. The difference, he theorized, arose because student doctors came to that ward directly after working on corpses in another class.

Semmelweis didn't know what it was about the corpses that might be responsible for the illness killing new mothers, but he wondered if hand washing would stop it. He instituted a hand-washing regimen and before long, the death rate in that ward fell fivefold.

Frequent hand washing may not prove as effective as a flu preventative, because the disease is also spread when people cough or sneeze. But it's the cheapest and easiest way there is to reduce the risk.