Hygiene


Hygiene is a set of practices performed to preserve health.
According to the World Health Organization, "Hygiene refers to conditions and practices that help to maintain health and prevent the spread of diseases." Personal hygiene refers to maintaining the body's cleanliness. Hygiene activities can be grouped into the following: home and everyday hygiene, personal hygiene, medical hygiene, sleep hygiene, and food hygiene. Home and every day hygiene includes hand washing, respiratory hygiene, food hygiene at home, hygiene in the kitchen, hygiene in the bathroom, laundry hygiene, and medical hygiene at home.
Many people equate hygiene with "cleanliness", but hygiene is a broad term. It includes such personal habit choices as how frequently to take a shower or bath, wash hands, trim fingernails, and wash clothes. It also includes attention to keeping surfaces in the home and workplace clean, including bathroom facilities. Adherence to regular hygiene practices is often regarded as a socially responsible and respectable behavior, while neglecting proper hygiene can be perceived as unclean or unsanitary, and may be considered socially unacceptable or disrespectful, while also posing a risk to public health.

Definition and overview

Hygiene is a practice related to lifestyle, cleanliness, health, and medicine. In medicine and everyday life, hygiene practices are preventive measures that reduce the incidence and spread of germs leading to disease.
Hygiene practices vary from one culture to another.
In the manufacturing of food, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and other products, good hygiene is a critical component of quality assurance.
The terms cleanliness and hygiene are often used interchangeably, which can cause confusion. In general, hygiene refers to practices that prevent spread of disease-causing organisms. Cleaning processes remove infectious microbes as well as dirt and soil, and are thus often the means to achieve hygiene.
Other uses of the term are as follows: body hygiene, personal hygiene, sleep hygiene, mental hygiene, dental hygiene, and occupational hygiene, used in connection with public health.

Home hygiene overview

Home hygiene pertains to the hygiene practices that prevent or minimize the spread of disease at home and other everyday settings such as social settings, public transport, the workplace, public places, and more. Hygiene in a variety of settings plays an important role in preventing the spread of infectious diseases. It includes procedures like hand hygiene, respiratory hygiene, food and water hygiene, general home hygiene, care of domestic animals, and home health care.
At present, these components of hygiene tend to be regarded as separate issues, although based on the same underlying microbiological principles. Preventing the spread of diseases means breaking the chain of infection transmission so that infection cannot spread. "Targeted hygiene" is based on identifying the routes of pathogen spread in the home and introducing hygiene practices at critical times to break the chain of infection. It uses a risk-based approach based on Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point.
The main sources of infection in the home are people, foods, water, pets, and domestic animals. Sites that accumulate stagnant water – such as sinks, toilets, waste pipes, cleaning tools, and face cloths – readily support microbial growth and can become secondary reservoirs of infection, though species are mostly those that threaten "at risk" groups. Pathogens are constantly shed via mucous membranes, feces, vomit, skin scales, and other means. When circumstances combine, people are exposed, either directly or via food or water, and can develop an infection.
The main "highways" for the spread of pathogens in the home are the hands, hand and food contact surfaces, and cleaning cloths and utensils. Pathogens can also be spread via clothing and household linens, such as towels. Utilities such as toilets and wash basins were invented to deal safely with human waste but still have risks associated with them. Safe disposal of human waste is a fundamental need; poor sanitation is a primary cause of diarrhea disease in low-income communities. Respiratory viruses and fungal spores spread via the air.
Good home hygiene means engaging in hygiene practices at critical points to break the chain of infection. Because the "infectious dose" for some pathogens can be very small, and infection can result from direct transfer of pathogens from surfaces via hands or food to the mouth, nasal mucous, or the eye, "hygienic cleaning" procedures should be adopted to eliminate pathogens from critical surfaces.

Hand washing

Regular handwashing with soap is one of the most effective ways to prevent the transmission of pathogens. It significantly reduces the risk of gastrointestinal and respiratory infections.

Respiratory hygiene

Correct respiratory and hand hygiene when coughing and sneezing reduces the spread of pathogens particularly during the cold and flu season:
  • Carry tissues and use them to catch coughs and sneezes, or sneeze into your elbow.
  • Dispose of tissues as soon as possible.

    Hygiene in the kitchen, bathroom and toilet

Routine cleaning of hands, food, sites, and surfaces in the kitchen, bathroom, and toilet rooms reduces the spread of pathogens. The infection risk from flush toilets is not high, provided they are properly maintained, although some splashing and aerosol formation can occur during flushing, particularly when someone has diarrhea. Pathogens can survive in the scum or scale left behind on baths, showers, and washbasins after washing and bathing.
Thorough cleaning is important to prevent the spread of fungal infections. Molds can live on wall and floor tiles and on shower curtains. Mold can be responsible for infections, cause allergic reactions, deteriorate/damage surfaces, and cause unpleasant odors. Primary sites of fungal growth are inanimate surfaces, including carpets and soft furnishings. Airborne fungi are usually associated with damp conditions, poor ventilation, or closed air systems.
Hygienic cleaning can be done through:
  • Mechanical removal using a soap or detergent. To be effective as a hygiene measure, this process must be followed by thorough rinsing under running water to remove pathogens from the surface.
  • Using a process or product that inactivates the pathogens in situ. Pathogen kill is achieved using a "micro-biocidal" product, i.e., a disinfectant or antibacterial product; waterless hand sanitizer; or by application of heat.
  • In some cases, combined pathogen removal with kill is used, e.g., laundering of clothing and household linens such as towels and bed linen.
  • House deep-cleaning an intensive cleaning process targeting often-neglected areas, enhancing aesthetics, and improving health by reducing allergens and bacteria. It typically includes tasks like detailed dusting, appliance cleaning, and carpet shampooing, recommended biannually to maintain a home's hygiene and air quality.

    Laundry hygiene

hygiene involves practices that prevent disease and its spread via soiled clothing and household linens such as towels. Items most likely to be contaminated with pathogens are those that come into direct contact with the body, e.g., underwear, personal towels, facecloths, nappies. Cloths or other fabric items used during food preparation, or for cleaning the toilet or cleaning up material such as feces or vomit are a particular risk.
Microbiological and epidemiological data indicates that clothing and household linens are a risk factor for infection transmission in home and everyday life settings as well as institutional settings. The lack of quantitative data linking contaminated clothing to infection in the domestic setting makes it difficult to assess the extent of this risk. This also indicates that risks from clothing and household linens are somewhat less than those associated with hands, hand contact and food contact surfaces, and cleaning cloths, but even so these risks need to be managed through effective laundering practices. In the home, this should be carried out as part of a multibarrier approach to hygiene which includes hand, food, respiratory, and other hygiene practices.
Infectious disease risks from contaminated clothing can increase significantly under certain conditions - for example, in healthcare situations in hospitals, care homes, and the domestic setting where someone has diarrhoea, vomiting, or a skin or wound infection. The risk increases in circumstances where someone has reduced immunity to infection.
Hygiene measures, including laundry hygiene, are an important part of reducing spread of antibiotic-resistant strains of infectious organisms. In the community, otherwise-healthy people can become persistent skin carriers of MRSA, or faecal carriers of enterobacteria strains which can carry multi-antibiotic resistance factors. The risks are not apparent until, for example, they are admitted to hospital, when they can become "self infected" with their own resistant organisms following a surgical procedure. As persistent nasal, skin, or bowel carriage in the healthy population spreads "silently" across the world, the risks from resistant strains in both hospitals and the community increases. In particular the data indicates that clothing and household linens are a risk factor for spread of S. aureus, and that effectiveness of laundry processes may be an important factor in defining the rate of community spread of these strains. Experience in the United States suggests that these strains are transmissible within families and in community settings such as prisons, schools, and sport teams. Skin-to-skin contact and indirect contact with contaminated objects such as towels, sheets, and sports equipment seem to represent the mode of transmission.
During laundering, temperature and detergent work to reduce microbial contamination levels on fabrics. Soil and microbes from fabrics are severed and suspended in the wash water. These are then "washed away" during the rinse and spin cycles. In addition to physical removal, micro-organisms can be killed by thermal inactivation which increases as the temperature is increased. Chemical inactivation of microbes by the surfactants and activated oxygen-based bleach used in detergents contributes to the hygiene effectiveness of laundering. Adding hypochlorite bleach in the washing process achieves inactivation of microbes. A number of other factors can contribute including drying and ironing.
Drying laundry on a line in direct sunlight is known to reduce pathogens.
In 2013, the International Scientific Forum on Home Hygiene reviewed 30 studies of the hygiene effectiveness of laundering at temperatures ranging from room temperature to, under varying conditions. A key finding was the lack of standardization and control within studies, and the variability in test conditions between studies such as wash cycle time, number of rinses, and other factors. The consequent variability in the data in turn makes it extremely difficult to propose guidelines for laundering with any confidence. As a result, there is significant variability in the recommendations for hygienic laundering given by different agencies.