#hand washing
I was inspired by @kathudsonart post on instagram so #dtiysSeriously though let’s not put our heath and the health of others at risk because of basic hygiene (btw I posting this here on tumblr first before my instagram so yay early release)
Keeping hands clean is one of the most important thing we can take to avoid getting sick. Then Let’s Wash Our Hands!
The Aviator (2004)
IMMUNOCOMPROMISED and Chronically Ill
Please listen to my dear friend Christina explain why social distancing is so critically important.
How are people with OCD handling the COVID-19 Pandemic?
forHealthline
It’s impossible to watch the news, listen to the radio, or be online without encountering various public service announcements about the importance of “hand hygiene” (regular handwashing for at least 20 seconds).
These are well-intentioned and important reminders, but for some people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) — particularly those who have “contamination OCD” — it can…
Early morning infectious disease thoughts I had instead of working on my midterms: are we well-served by acting like (proper) hand washing is a simple and easy thing everyone does unless they’re gross and dirty people? I have been seeing a lot of people respond to the recent increase in COVID-related hand washing reminders with stuff like “WTF has everyone been doing up to now??? Why do people need to be told this?? Y'all are disgusting smh ” and I am… conflicted about it.
In undergrad I thought about this quite a bit while researching and writing about cholera. In that context it was about the way we in wealthy countries often talk about hygiene in poor countries, as if it’s simple––and moreover, with the implication that failures of personal hygiene reflect moral failing––without giving much, if any, consideration to structural issues like access to soap and clean running water, etc. There’s a lot that needs to be said about such attitudes in a “global health” context, (mostly a lot of unpacking of racist, colonialist views regarding a view of a racialized other as dirty and diseased and of ourselves as inherently superior) but even within our own communities in places like the US, I think some of this condescending, moralizing view on hand washing might need to be questioned, even if you believe that the two contexts can be kept entirely separate and that moralizing the issue amongst ourselves doesn’t necessarily feed into racist and classist views of who is dirty and who is clean.
Because, in fact, when we research hand hygiene in the so-called “developed” world (as far as I can tell, the bulk of such research is done in healthcare settings, where the stakes and the standards are both quite a bit higher, but the same is true of community-based studies, more or less) what we find is that compliance remains well below what it would need to be in order to effectively prevent infections for many vulnerable people. Access (at least in theory) is not the problem in these contexts, particularly when you take the availability of alcohol-based hand sanitizers into account. Awareness shouldn’t be the problem here either, at least of the fact that hand washing is a thing you should do to prevent infection (there’s maybe more to be said about knowledge of proper hand washing techniques). And yet, we consistently fall short of what is needed to effectively prevent infection. This is why people continue to put money into hand hygiene awareness campaigns in places like the US.
To quote Atul Gawande from his essay “On Washing Hands”: “Anything short of a[n] […] obsession with hand washing has begun to seem inadequate.”
It seems to me that we can conclude one of two things from our failure as a group to clean our hands: either “y'all are disgusting smh”, or that maintaining proper hand hygiene is harder than we give it credit for.
When I say I’m conflicted about this, I mean that genuinely. Part of me thinks that, because hand hygiene is something that is theoretically within our ability to achieve, shaming each other might translate into effective social pressure. If you believe other people are looking at you with disdain for leaving the restroom without washing your hands, or for coughing into your hand and then touching the subway pole or whatever, maybe that will serve as a reminder to practice better hand hygiene in your daily life. Given that an inability to maintain continual awareness of how dirty your hands are is arguably the biggest obstacle to keeping them as clean as possible, maybe this is a good thing.
On the other hand (no pun intended), I think that when we talk about anything in terms of “people who do/do not do the thing are Disgusting Bad People” it typically prevents us from mentally considering whether we individually are part of the problem. If having dirty hands is a reflection of what kind of person you are, I can more easily take for granted that I am doing enough to maintain my hand hygiene, because I know that I am not a Gross Disgusting Person. I can direct my frustration with inadequate hygiene outwards at other people who are failing to do this basic thing, and not think about the fact that I’ve touched my face like 20 times while writing this post and I never disinfect my phone screen. When we talk about having clean hands like it’s a given for any intelligent and good person, we vastly oversimplify what is, in reality, a surprisingly difficult-to-maintain thing that requires our sustained attention and effort! (This is very applicable to other situations as well. Replace “dirty hands” with “racism” in this last paragraph and I think you get an important reframing of that issue, i.e., being anti-racist has to be a continual and active process in which we must continually implicate ourselves, not something you can take for granted because you know you’re a good person with good intentions.)
So, uh, I guess tl;dr: wash your damn hands, but maybe don’t be a jerk about it? Idk. #StopTouchingYourFaceDave
