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To get your kids to wash their hands, gross them out
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Bacteria teem on a mobile phone. - photo by Jennifer Graham
Want your kids to wash their hands? Gross them out, say researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

A report they presented last week at the annual conference of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology showed that health-care workers were more likely to wash their hands after they viewed magnified pictures of bacteria swarming on skin and work surfaces.

Co-authors Ashley Gregory and Eman Chami call it "the yuck factor." After inspecting images of bacteria on a persons hand, a cellphone and a mouse pad, workers in four patient-care units improved their hand-washing by an average of 24 percent, and in some cases, much more than that.

Presumably, health-care workers are already well-educated about the need to wash their hands regularly since weve known that disease is transmitted through dirty hands since 1846, when a Hungarian doctor realized that women were dying in childbirth because of shared germs. (Unfortunately, for the largely forgotten Ignaz Semmelweis, French chemist Louis Pasteur got most of the credit for germ theory.)

As much as we'd like to believe hospitals are the cleanest public places, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say health-care workers clean their hands only half as much as they should, which explains why 1 in 25 hospital patients picks up an infection from the place they went to get well.

Enter the team at Henry Ford Hospital, which is determined to improve sanitation. According to the news site Vocativ, Gregory and Chami swabbed nurses' hands and equipment, then showed them what they found under a microscope.

"The nurses were horrified. But they started washing their hands," wrote Joshua A. Krisch for Vocativ. Afterward, one unit increased its compliance by 142 percent.

I think health-care workers, in general, become numb to the fact that hospitals are an environment of germs, Gregory said. Pictures go a long way to breaking that detachment and give hospitals a new tool for their hand-hygiene toolkit.

It's a tool that parents can use as well.

Hospital workers are supposed to wash their hands 100 times in a 12-hour shift. A parent's bar is not so high, but the CDC says people should wash their hands before and/or after nine activities: preparing food, eating, caring for the sick, treating a wound, changing diapers, using the bathroom, blowing your nose, dealing with animals and touching garbage.

Of course, some experts say today's children are too clean, and we're sanitizing them so much that their immune systems aren't functioning properly. The Washington Post has noted that children ages 6 to 11 only need to bathe once or twice a week, unless they've been playing in mud, swimming in a pool, ocean or lake, or are just exceptionally smelly.

But pretty much everyone agrees that vigorous hand-washing with soap and water is important. And given the research from Detroit, parents might want to consider posting a picture of some creepy-crawly bacteria above the sink. (No, they cannot keep them as pets.)
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From the book 'Outliers' comes proof that good health is more than just genetics
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Friends Jim Young, left, Mike Natale, Jeff Natale and Ryan Kiernan were on Greenwich High School football team together and Jim and Mike were captains. Jim, who was the youngest in Sherry Young's family, was welcome in the homes of the other three boys who still had siblings around and grandparents near. - photo by Sherry Young
As I look back on my life and the lives of others, both personally and in the reading I have done, I am convinced of the necessity of positive human contact in our lives. We are doubly blessed when we are able to make good friends or are a part of a family where we are accepted and loved.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers tells of a time in the 1950s when Dr. Stewart Wolf met a physician who practiced in the area of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Roseto was settled by a group of Italian families from Roseto, Italy, who re-created their life again in America.

This was in the 1950s before drugs and measures to prevent heart disease became important. In their conversation the physician said, You know, Ive been practicing for 17 years. I get patients from all over, and I rarely find anyone from Roseto under the age of 65 with heart disease.

Wolf was surprised by these words as, It was impossible to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart disease.

Wolf enlisted the aid of a sociologist and friend John Bruhn to help him. They found, There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didnt have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didnt have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. Thats it.

They checked into diet, genetics and possibilities of something in the foothills of eastern Pennsylvania but nothing made sense.

What they found was that Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. (Researchers) learned about the extended family clans that underlay the towns social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted 22 separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2,000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.

What they found eventually convinced the medical establishment to look beyond the individual and understand the culture people are part of their friends, families and town they came from. They determined that the people we surround ourselves with and the values of the world we inhabit have a profound effect on who we are.

Likely, this study could have been done with other ethnicities. However, my family's experiences with the Italian families in Connecticut ring true to the study. Our hungry and growing sons, especially our youngest son, Jim, who was left home alone with two beady-eyed parents, all had some memorable experiences being fed and loved in the Cos Cob multigenerational families. Proof of the African proverb, It takes a village to raise a child.

We live in an age when the contact we have with people often is on the internet, and many of us live among strangers. Unless we make the effort to reach out, we will become isolated, especially as we age. The Rosetan study is proof that reaching out and communicating may be good for our health.
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