While hand washing before and after meals in addition to other appropriate times is a basic hand hygiene habit that has been taught generation over generation, it is also the most neglected ones. Despite parents nagging their kids to wash hands especially before meals, it usually falls on deaf ears. Kids usually learn this from adults in the house who usually forget to act and just go on preaching.
Here are some often most common infections that can spread and make your little ones sick because they forgot to wash their hands before meals.
Throat infections: When one eats food without washing their hands, the food carries with nutrients various germs that can cause throat infections of varying degrees. Bacteria goes down your wind pipe along with the food and comes in contact with the mucus lining eventually leading to throat infections. The simple act of washing hands before meals can avert the situation and the result discomfort. Children and throat infections can be a nightmare to deal with given how cranky kids tend to get.
Diarrhea: This is one of those diseases that spreads hugely due to lack of hand hygiene before eating food. Germs causing diarrhea are mainly spread due to eating with contaminated hands especially after using pubic washrooms and visiting public places. Again, the age-old remedy of washing hands comes to your rescue to prevent it. Anyone sensible knows it's a lot easier to wash hands before meals than to deal with digestion problems and dehydration that can cry easily disrupt your everyday life.
Hepatitis B: This is one of the nasty ones that can spread through contact. Washing hands with soap reduces the bacterial load on the hands and restricts the transmission of the infection causing agents.
Food infections: Ones electronic gadgets like the computer, laptop and mobile etc. have the highest bacterial load due to continuous use and sharing of the gadgets. People often forget to wash their hands before meals when busy working on electronics leading to food infections. Especially with kids playing on tablets and video games.
Respiratory diseases: With it being the good ole winter season across the country it is common to fall sick with the common cold, cough and flu. Both these spread with hand contact and can give you a rather tough time. Hand washing is known to reduce rate of infection by more than 50% as compared to those who do not wash hands before meals.
These are just some of the infections that your child can get infected with due to lack of hand hygiene before meals. Washing hand at appropriate times is the simplest way to bring down the number of times your child falls sick through a given year as shown b research across the world.
Teach your child how much fun and how important it is to wash their hands before meals to ensure that they have a healthy childhood and they grow up to be healthy responsible adults.
