Posts Tagged ‘illness’

Please remove the poo from your fingers

In Quotes on 18 November 2008 tagged germs, hygiene, illness with Comments Off

In the toi­lets of a ser­vice sta­tion Dr Val Curtis is waging a one-woman war on dirty hands that spread dis­ease:

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…