HYGIENE A handy method of avoiding illness

Think your hands are still clean after touching that dollar bill? Think again.
By JOHN DORSCHNER
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Best way to avoid disease? America's microbiologists say it's a no-brainer: Just wash your hands.
"Taking 15 seconds with regular soap and water can do a lot to stop disease," said Judy Daly, secretary of the American Society for Microbiology, which is launching a campaign to get people to clean up.
The society calls hand washing "the best public defense against the spread of both common and rare, even life-threatening diseases such as SARS, and against such gastrointestinal infections as Norwalk virus, which have recently plagued the cruise industry."
Daly, a microbiologist at the University of Utah, said spending those 15 seconds washing your hands with soap and water is particularly important after using the toilet, handling money or petting an animal.
That should be obvious to most adults, but ASM researchers found that many of us say we wash our hands much more often than we do.
The latest telephone ASM survey, conducted of 1,000 people in August, found that 95 percent said they washed their hands after using the bathroom, though only 77 percent said they did so after changing a diaper.
Sink surveillance
Knowing from past experience that Americans lie about such things, the society didn't stop there. It sent spies into the public restrooms of six major airports.
After observing 7,541 people, they found that 26 percent of men and 17 percent of women didn't wash their hands after using the facilities.
The most fastidious place, by far, was Toronto, where 96 percent washed their hands.
In all places but one, women were considerably cleaner than men, the survey found. The exception was San Francisco, where 80 percent of men washed their hands but only 59 percent of women did so.
The good news, the society found, is that Americans seem to be getting better. In the current survey, 78 percent of all men and women washed their hands, compared to 67 percent in a similar survey in 2000 and 68 percent in 1996.
The key to transmitting many diseases is what experts call "the fecal-oral" syndrome. That's particularly true of flulike diseases that have spread aboard cruise ships.
The basic scenario goes like this: People don't wash their hands and then leave germs on bathroom doorknobs, where they're picked up by others who then go off to the buffet line, to eat with their just-contaminated hands.
XFor more information on the importance of hand washing, go to www.washup.org, operated by the American Society for Microbiology.