Study reveals too many people have faecal bacteria on their hands

Oct 14 2008

A study by British researchers has revealed many of us may not be as clean as we think we are.

The researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine have found many people have faecal bacteria on their hands.

According to a preliminary study conducted by the research team, the further north you go in Britain, the more likely you are to have faecal bacteria on your hands, and men were the worse offenders.

The Dirty Hands Study was conducted in order to provide a picture of the nation's hand hygiene habits, as part of the world's first Global Handwashing Day.

The researchers swabbed the hands of commuters at bus stops outside five train stations around Britain - Newcastle, Liverpool, Birmingham, Euston and Cardiff and it was found that Northerners' hands were up to 3 times dirtier than those living in the South.

But women living in the South and Wales have no call to feel smug - in London, they are three times as likely as their men folk to have dirty hands, and in Cardiff, twice as likely.

The men of London registered the most impressive score among all those surveyed, with a mere 6% found to have faecal bugs on their hands - however the awful fact is that overall more than one in four commuters have bacteria which come from faeces on their hands.

The results of the Dirty Hands Study indicates that commuters in Newcastle were up to three times more likely than those in London to have faecal bacteria on their hands (44% compared to 13%) while those in Birmingham and Cardiff were roughly equal in the hand hygiene stakes (23% and 24% respectively); commuters in Liverpool also registered a high score for faecal bacteria, with a contamination rate of 34%.

In Newcastle and Liverpool, men were more likely than women to show contamination (53% of men compared to 30% of women in Newcastle, and 36% of men compared to 31% of women in Liverpool), although in the other three centres, the women's hands were dirtier.

Almost twice as many women than men in Cardiff were found to have contamination (29% compared to 15%) while in Euston, they were more than three times likelier than the men to have faecal bacteria on their hands (the men here registered an impressive 6%, compared to a rate of 21% in the women) - in Birmingham, the rate for women was slightly higher than the men (26% compared to 21%).

Although the bacteria that were found are all from the gut, and do not necessarily always cause disease, they do indicate that hands have not been washed properly and Dr. Val Curtis, Director of the Hygiene Centre at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, says they were flabbergasted that so many people had faecal bugs on their hands.

Dr. Curtis says the figures were far higher than anticipated, and suggest that there is a real problem with people washing their hands - and if any of these people had been suffering from a diarrhoeal disease, the potential for it to be passed around would be greatly increased by their failure to wash their hands after going to the toilet.

Global Handwashing Day aims to promote handwashing with soap to reduce diarrhoea in developing countries and is being implemented in more than forty countries to focus on the importance of handwashing with regard to public health.

For more information about Global Handwashing Day, go to www.globalhandwashingday.org.