© 2003 BMJ Publishing Group & British Association of Sport and Exercise Medicine
EDITORIAL
Warm up
To wash or not to wash? That is the question
Keywords: hand washing; diarrhoea; hygiene
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In my office, I have 12 general textbooks on sport medicine. I am not bragging about this but simply stating an easily verifiable fact. I had recently been reading a newspaper article that noted that the second biggest killer of children in the world is not malaria or tuberculosis, nor AIDS. It is diarrhoea. Over 2000 children die every single day throughout the world from this problem. The simplest solution to reducing this disease burden may be to teach people to wash their hands with soap. Studies suggest that this manouevre alone may reduce diarrhoeal illness by up to 43%. Surprisingly hand washing also reduces the biggest child killer of all, respiratory tract infections. A study by the US military found that respiratory infections dropped by 45% when troops washed their hands five times a day.
Obvious really. Perhaps too obvious because it is surprisingly seldom done. Even
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This article has been cited by other articles:
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Grosch, E N
(2003). Silence on clinical fundamentals. Br. J. Sports. Med.
37: 560-560
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