handwashing
lborkowski | October 15, 2012October 15th is Global Handwashing Day. CDC explains why handwashing deserves the recognition:
This observance increases awareness and understanding of handwashing with soap as an effective and affordable method of preventing disease around the world.
Handwashing with soap has an important role to play in child survival and health. About 2.2 million children aged <5 years die each year from diarrheal diseases or pneumonia, the top two killers of young children worldwide. Handwashing is not only simple and inexpensive, but handwashing with soap can reduce the incidence of diarrhea by 30%…
lborkowski | May 7, 2012A recent Freakonomics podcast tells one of my favorite public health stories: how observant physician Ignaz Semmelweis figured out how to slash the incidence of childbed, or puerperal, fever, a disease that killed 10-15% of the women who gave birth in the doctor-staffed ward of the Vienna General Hospital in the mid-nineteenth century. (Death rates were similarly alarming elsewhere, since germ theory hadn't yet taken hold.)
As the podcast explains, Semmelweis observed that the death rate from childbed fever was lower among women who delivered babies in the ward staffed by midwives compared to…
lborkowski | October 14, 2011
By Jay Graham
Global Handwashing Day is coming up on October 15, and events in its honor will be occurring all week. Children are a key focus of handwashing campaigns. Diarrhea continues as the second leading cause of death in kids under 5 years of age globally. Nearly one in every five child deaths, around 1.5 million a year, is due to diarrhea. It kills more children than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined - more than 4,000 children dying every day.
So, why Global Handwashing Day? Handwashing may be the single most cost-effective public health intervention ever. In a systematic review,…