Teaching children to wash their hands properly could help stop the spread of infection and thereby limit the use of antibiotics, UK medicines watchdog the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) advised this week.
Bacteria are, of course, all around. Many of them are essential and harmless, but there are also those that can cause us to become ill.
In 2014 the Global Hygiene Council, which is funded by the health, hygiene and home products company Reckitt Benckiser, measured the level of bacterial contamination on eight surfaces in 20 family homes in the UK, testing them for bacteria including enterobacteriaceae, E.coli and Staphylococcus aureus (a group of bacteria that includes MRSA).
The eight household items were then ranked based on how many of them were found to be clean. By this measure, kitchen cloths and sponges were the worst offenders – none of the sponges in any of the 20 UK households were acceptably clean (and yes, the sponges tested were worse than the toilet brush handle).
