Wash your hands properly, halve the diarrheal disease

About 836 million people suffer from diarrhea every year in China, and about 1/3 of them are children. And simple hygiene habits – wash your hands, you can halve this number.

Diarrhea is one of the leading causes of death in children younger than 5 years of age, killing more than 160,000 children each year. Washing hands with soap is an effective and economical way to prevent diarrhea and acute respiratory infections such as the flu. However, the proportion of hand washing around the world is very low, accounting for only 3% to 30%. Dr. Stephen Laby of the International Center for Diarrhoeal Diseases said that many diseases in the world are spread by hand. Either through direct hand contact between people, or the hands of the bacteria contaminate the food and spread through the food. Therefore, the importance of washing hands is not only to protect the hand washing person, but also to block the spread chain of the bacteria and protect others.

Ms. Therese Dooley, Senior Health Adviser at UNICEF, believes that soaping is an effective and inexpensive means of preventing diseases such as diarrhoea. It is necessary to incorporate soaping into the agenda of child survival, growth and education.

The school is the most concentrated place for children, and it is also a learning center with the necessary venue for teaching. A child is like a blank sheet of paper, and it is easy to accept new ideas. Children between the ages of 2 and 5 are the easiest to cultivate. At the same time, because of the concentration of the school population, it is also easy to cause the problem of disease transmission. In addition, students are a link to parents who teach the knowledge of hand washing learned at school to their parents. Cultivating students’ good hand-washing habits can also have long-term effects. If the younger generation has this good hygiene habit, then the next generation will be well inherited.

As for other effective ways to prevent diarrhea, Stephen Laby mentioned that it can improve water quality, reduce water pollution, and some vaccine products have also proven to effectively protect us from diarrhea.