How many times have we heard “Wash your hands!” from our Mothers or Grandmothers? In the  90's to get everyone into the hand washing habit, experts had equated proper hand washing must last as long as the “Happy Birthday” song (the version without “you belong to the zoo”…).
In the surge of potent germs and contaminants of mutated sickness hand washing is again promoted as the safest and the first line of defense against sickness. We are often surprised when we get sick, the amount of vitamins or the food we take or the rigid 8 hour sleep don't seem to stand up against getting sick. Basically we encounter germs all the time specially in places where throngs of people are. Germs are sly and are always hidden, on a grocery cart handle or  door knob even on the hand towel the whole nursery class uses to wipe their hands surely carry dreaded germs.
Contagious and silent attackers, some ailments have mutated to potent versions so the repetitive “Wash your hands!” must be supported with proper germ killing hand washing with soap and water or alcohol based sanitizer (60%-70% only!). Soap and water hand washing is an easy 6-step process:
-Wet hands to melt the soap.
-Make soap lather
-Spread and rub lather in the space between the fingers
-Rub lather on palms then at the back of the hands at this point lathering would have reached 10 to 20 seconds…
-Open tap with a paper towel, rinse off soapy lather the same way you made lather (between webs of fingers, back of palm and the palms)
-Use a per towel to switch off the tap.
Hand washing must be done after handling publicly used things, pets, feces (human or the pet kind), grease or dust. Bottom line, clean up when dirty.