Saving lives with soap and water

Friday 15 October 2010 marks the third annual Global Handwashing Day. The aims of the project are to encourage a global culture of handwashing with soap, to spotlight the state of handwashing in each country and to raise public awareness of its benefits.

Of the many hygiene practices that can help prevent disease, handwashing with soap has been shown to be the one with the strongest evidence of both effectiveness and cost-efficiency.

It works because a combination of soap, water and the friction produced by hand-rubbing helps to solubilise and remove dirt and pathogens from the hands.

Around 120 million children are born in developing countries each year and around half have no access to good sanitation.

The biggest killers of these children are diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections, and around 88 per cent of the 1.5 million deaths from diarrhoea in under-fives are directly attributable to poor sanitary conditions. But both these conditions can be prevented by handwashing.

So, in addition to improving sanitation facilities, the promotion of better personal hygiene is a key component of the project’s intervention programmes.

Despite available data showing the disease prevention benefits of regular handwashing with soap, the cost of providing free soap and holding regular community meetings and promotional visits can be prohibitively expensive. The challenge is to develop cost-effective strategies to reach the hundreds of millions of households involved.

Interestingly, antibacterial soap shows no improvement over standard soap, although fragranced soap results in fresher smelling hands, making promotion of its use easier.

So it has been suggested that soap companies, instead of funding marketing campaigns promoting antibacterial soaps in developed nations, should divert their attention to improving the lathering qualities and improving the sensory experience of their products to help save lives.