Curtis, the director of the Hygiene Centre at the University of London, a co-founder of the Global Partnership for Handwashing with Soap, and all-round hand-washing aficionado, has not collated the final results yet. But even the most disgusting electronic message she could think of, “Soap it off or eat it later”, has failed to elicit a scrum for the soap. “I think what we need to do next is put up a poster with a big photo of poo on it,” she sighs.

Just in case anyone needed any further encouragement (!) to wash their hands:

Absentee numbers have plummeted at one school, George Watson’s College, in Edinburgh after it introduced mandatory hospital-style handwashing for all its pupils in January.

I do have to admit to having previously thought that the computer labs at uni could do with a decontamination chamber at the door. I’m not bothered by dirt in the slightest, but germs are another matter altogether given my complete lack of anything approaching a functioning immune system, and you only need to look at the state of the monitors to deduce the state of the keyboards. Maybe I’ll just borrow that poo poster…