Keep Calm And Wash Your Hands

After 200 years, it took a pandemic to emphasize something we should all know by now: handwashing saves lives.

- Judith S. Juntilla

Before Ignac Semmelweis spoke up, mothers were dying unnecessarily. Semmelweis was an 18th-century Hungarian obstetrician who cared for women who fell ill during childbirth. Back then, puerperal fever (or, childbed fever) was a leading cause of maternal deaths and was largely attributed to miasma (bad air), infections from epidemics, or God’s will.

Before Semmelweis, it was not common practice for physicians to wash their hands before handling patients. He noticed, quite disturbingly, that doctors would visit the maternity ward directly after performing autopsies. The doctor suspected there to be a link between “unholy hands” and the maternal deaths, so he imposed a strict handwashing policy for physicians, disallowing those with unwashed hands from entering the labor room. This led to a marked decrease in maternal deaths within a year of the experiment, forever establishing Semmelweis as the “Father of Infection Control” and changing the way the world viewed the importance of handwashing.

It took a pandemic to remind people of something that has been widely accepted for two centuries now: washing your hands can save your life and is a cost-effective, scientifically proven way of protecting oneself against infectious diseases.

While current research shows that COVID-19 is primarily spread through the air and that it can remain infectious in airborne particles for up to three hours, there is still a difference of opinion on how long it can survive on surfaces. What is known, however, is that other deadly diseases can definitely be spread by dirty hands.