=Towards Living a Healthier Life=

How many times do you wash your hands every day? Do you wash your hands before you eat? Do you wash your hands after going to the toilet? Do you wash your hands before feeding your child?

Hand washing is an easy and simple thing to do. Almost everyone can easily wash their hands even without thinking about it first. All you need are soap and warm water, or just simply a hand sanitizer without water at all. So you can do it almost every time and everywhere. But do you know that hand washing in an appropriate manner would become a way to avoiding you from being sick. Too bad, that not so many people make hand washing as their habit.

Why washing your hand frequently and properly is very important. Here are some reasons for us to consider.

• Throughout our daily life we made contact with almost everything around us, people, animal, walls, tables, seats, doorknobs, telephone, etc. No one can guarantee that the entire thing we touch with our hands during our daily life is free of germs. In fact, those things are actually a huge source of a large variety of germ. You will finally infect yourself when you use your hands to touch your ear, mouth, nose, or eyes. Besides that, during our life we will touch many things, one to another. So this is why you should wash your hand frequently enough. Not only to protect you from the germs, but also to avoid spreading those germs to another place or another people.
• Some infectious diseases usually spread from one person to another through hand-to-hand contact. Those diseases include common cold, influenza, and diarrhea. While common cold will relieve for a couple of days, influenza and diarrhea can cause a bigger medical problem. Some people with chronic medical problem can develop pneumonia form influenza. Babies and little kid can suffer from dehydration caused by diarrhea. Even in some developing countries those two illnesses, pneumonia and diarrhea, are still part of the common cause of death.
• Poor hand hygiene will also contribute to food related illnesses. It’s including salmonella infection that can cause typhoid, E. coli infection that can cause abdominal problems, and hepatitis A virus infection. All of it will surely bring a serious problem to your health.

So we see how much problem that we can actually avoid only by applying a simple measurement like hand washing. Then why don’t we make it as our habit, since it only takes a few times yet bring a huge advantage. Wash your hands with soap and warm water, or simply use a hand sanitizer to make it even easier.