Happy Holiday!
[Guest post by DRJ]
This weekend marks the end of National Clean Hands Week and researchers think some of us are dirty liars:
“American adults are liars, at least when it comes to washing their hands. In a recent telephone survey, 91 percent of the subjects claimed they always washed their hands after using public restrooms. But, when researchers observed people leaving public restrooms, only 83 percent actually did so. Only 75 percent of men washed their hands compared to 90 percent of women, the observations revealed.
***
These results were released by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) and the SDA to highlight National Clean Hands Week, which runs from Sept. 18 through the 24.”
If you’re like me, you want even more information on this subject – like how and where the study was conducted.
Apparently this was based on a telephone survey and field observations. Based on the telephone survey, researchers learned that we Americans are even less likely to wash our hands after diapering a baby (73%), petting a cat or dog (43%), sneezing or coughing (32%) or handling money (21%). The field observations were conducted in six locations:
“Observers were stationed at Turner Field in Atlanta, the Museum of Science and Industry and the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, Grand Central Station and Penn Station in New York, and the Ferry Terminal Farmers Market in San Francisco. They observed 3,206 men and 3,310 women. Here’s some of what they saw:
* Sports fans at Turner Field, particularly the guys, had the worst hand hygiene habits –only 74 percent of all patrons washed their hands (84 percent of the women and 63 percent of the men).
* Results from the New York train stations provided the biggest gender split – 92 percent of the women washed their hands compared to only 64 percent of the men.
* San Francisco turned out to be the most hygiene-conscious city in the study – 88 percent of the market goers washed their hands after using the facilities.
You might be wondering how the observations were handled. The observers were instructed to spend time combing their hair or putting on makeup and to rotate bathrooms every hour or so, and were only allowed to wash their hands 10 percent of the time.”
Too bad Senator Craig didn’t know about this study before he plead guilty but, given his recent legal about-face, it’s not too late for him to claim he was conducting research in the Minneapolis airport.
— DRJ
Now let’s see a study on nose-picking, by gender, city, age and race.
Who cares?
The #1 health problem in San Francisco is not the lack of hand-washing.
ManlyDad (d62cf6) — 9/22/2007 @ 5:03 pmI wash my hands very thoroughly when I use the bathroom. I also wash my hands every time I walk into the house and every time I walk into the kitchen from another part of the house. I don’t, as a rule, wash my hands after patting the dog subject to second sentence supra. Dogs are clean animals. I don’t pat cats.
nk (7c7414) — 9/22/2007 @ 5:57 pmP.S. And I washed my hands before and after diapering the baby.
nk (7c7414) — 9/22/2007 @ 5:58 pmI don’t wash my hands near as often as you do, NK, and I don’t see any reason to wash after petting the dog. A few good pets wipes a lot of dirt and germs off my hands and onto the dog, and he doesn’t mind.
Anyway, one of the authors’ main points is that people in the telephone survey lie, so why should we believe any of this?
DRJ (ec59b5) — 9/22/2007 @ 6:13 pmThe reason, I believe, for my habits is that I grew up on a farm. The kitchen door was the main door and there was a basin right next to it outside. We didn’t walk in before washing up.
nk (7c7414) — 9/22/2007 @ 6:28 pmPublic bathroom soap stinks! Literally. This past month or so I’ve noticed several places where the smell is way too strong and you can’t rinse enough to make it go away! The odor is very similar to gasoline, and as difficult to wash off. Maybe some huge Chinese batch of bogus soap has infiltrated major LA custodian supply companies. What is up?!
It is so ridiculous that I’ve noticed other people walking around reeking with this foul clean-bathroom-hands smell too. Is ‘no odor’ too much to ask?
Wesson (fd354d) — 9/23/2007 @ 2:17 amI could be more fastidious about washing my hands; I am quite sure that I do not always “”wash up”. But then, my parents taught me not to piss on my hands.
MikeD (53e3a4) — 9/23/2007 @ 7:41 amHow about polling all senators and congressmen:
When in a public restroom, how often do you tap the foot of the guy in the next stall?
TomHynes (6c3e12) — 9/23/2007 @ 7:46 amIt fascinates me that San Francisco is supposedly more hygiene-conscious than other places, given that my primary impression of SF public restrooms is that it is almost impossible to use a public urinal without standing in some other guy’s piss. I’m originally from Tucson where the floor in front of urinals always seemed to be dry except in bars. In SF, every urinal everywhere seems to have a little puddle in front of it. I’ve always wondered why.
Doc Rampage (ebfd7a) — 9/23/2007 @ 4:22 pm