Balanced: Hand Washing for Disease Prevention

Saving money on healthcare isn't always the easiest task for most people. Health care is expensive. However, one simple step, done multiple times a day can help keep you your healthiest: wash your hands. Hand washing, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), is the single most important preventive step in reducing disease transmission.

Keeping your hands clean and free of germs is one of the most important steps that we can take to avoid both spreading germs and getting ourselves sick. If you can prevent yourself from contracting the common cold or the swine flu, you can save yourself some dough not visiting the doctor's office.

Everyone knows how to wash their hands, right? Soap, water, rub the hands together, rinse and dry, right? Almost. The CDC recommends these steps to properly wash your hands:

1. Wet your hands with warm, clean, running water and apply soap.
2. Rub hands to make a lather and scrub all surfaces.
3. Continue rubbing your hands together for 20 seconds. (20 seconds is roughly the equivalent of singing Happy Birthday twice)
4. Rinse your hands well under the warm, clean, running water.
5. Dry your hands using a paper towel or an air dryer. (If possible, turn off faucet with a paper towel)

If you have a choice between a paper towel or an air dryer, use the paper towels. A 2005 study done by TUV Produkt & Umwelt showed that using paper towels decreased the bacterial count on hands by 24% while a hot-air dryer actually increased the amount of bacteria by 117%!

While it is best to wash your hands with warm water and soap, if you use an alcohol-based gel to clean your hands, apply the product to the palm of one hand and rub the product over all the surfaces of hands and fingers until they are dry. This alcohol-based gel will kill most of the bacteria, E. coli, Salmonella and Campylobacter but will not kill bacterial spores and certain viruses.

When should you wash your hands?

• after going to the bathroom or changing diapers/cleaning up a child who has gone to the bathroom
• before and after tending to someone who is sick
• after blowing your nose, coughing or sneezing
• after handling garbage
• before and after treating a cut or open wound

Hand washing seems like a pain sometimes, but it's actually easy to do, effective at disease prevention when done properly and can even be made fun for children with soaps from Lush or The Body Shop.

Are you a regular hand-washer? If not, why? What could make it easier for you? How do you encourage your children to wash their hands?

When she's not writing for Savings.com, Sarah teaches health and science to high schoolers. You can also find Sarah at WEGO Health, where she is an advocate of improved health conditions for women and children of both the United States and globally and on her personal blog, Sarahndipitea.