World Health Organization

  • H1N1=wash your hands

    Posted: June 19th, 2009 - 8:37am by Megan Hardigree

    Doug introduced me to Google Alerts a few weeks ago and my email inbox hasn’t been the same since. I get approximately 50-100 email hits on handwashing everyday. Most of them are relevant to washing hands, but some are about handwashing clothes and dishes.

    The reason for sharing my numerous emails: wash your hands.

    The World Health Organization (WHO) recently announced raising the alert level to phase 6, the pandemic phase. The severity of the virus, H1N1, is moderate, claims the WHO. Across the world there are newly suspected cases of so-called swine flu. In the US alone, there have been 17,800 confirmed cases, 1600 hospitalized, and 44 deaths; all are attributed to H1N1 flu.

    Every reported case in the news or other blogs is typically accompanied with a campaign for their readers to wash their hands. I, of course, couldn’t pass up the opportunity to inform BarfBlog readers to do the same.

    Handwashing can reduce sickness by an estimated 25%. Hands should be washed before and after handling food, using the bathroom, coughing, sneezing, and blowing ones nose. Also, people should avoid touching their face (eyes, nose, and mouth) to reduce their risk.

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    Barfblog, Google, H1n1, Swine Flu, World Health Organization
  • Save Lives: Clean Your Hands

    Posted: May 6th, 2009 - 11:26am by Doug Powell

    Megan Hardigree, a research associate at Kansas State University working on hand hygiene, writes that this year, Cinco de Mayo wasn’t just a holiday to celebrate the Mexican army’s victory over the French in the Battle of Puebla (yesterday) or a song by the band, Cake. It was also a day to celebrate the launch of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) newest hand hygiene campaign: Save Lives: Clean Your Hands.

    The aim of Save Lives: Clean Your Hands is to stop the spread of infection by increasing hand hygiene of healthcare workers. This is said to be the next step of the original, Clean Care is Safer Care, from 2005. The initiative persuades individuals to join the movement with gain-framed messages (they apparently encourage positive behavior) such as “Help stop hospital acquired infections in your country” and “Make patient safety your number one priority.”

    To help support this initiative, WHO has accompanied the promotion with a variety of tools and resources to aid healthcare facilities in promoting and enforcing better hand hygiene. These tools include: tools for system change, tools for training and education, tools for evaluation and feedback, tools as reminders in the workplace, and tools for institutional safety climate. My personal favorite, mostly because of the fun diagram, is in the “tools as reminders in the workplace” which includes “My 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene:”

    • before touching a patient;
    • before clean/aseptic procedures;
    • after body fluid exposure/risk;
    • after touching a patient; and,
    • after touching patient surroundings.

     “Be a part of a global movement to improve hand hygiene, “ says WHO.

    Now to evaluate whether any of these messages actually compel people to wash their hands.
     

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    Cinco De Mayo, Cupcake, effectiveness, Evaluation, Messages, New Mexico, Whole Foods, World Health Organization
  • Food safety has to be farm-to-fork: WHO

    Posted: November 20th, 2008 - 10:21pm by Doug Powell

    That’s what we’ve always said – safe food, from farm-to-fork.

    Jorgen Schlundt, director of food safety at WHO, told Reuters today,

    “The notion that you can deal with it at the end of the food chain is clearly wrong.”

    Yet there continues to be an outpouring of advice for consumers – the end of the food chain. But more about that later.

    Schlundt also said today that the number of foodborne diseases seems to be on the rise in both wealthy and poor nations.

    Previously, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that up to 30 per cent of individuals in developed countries acquire illnesses from the food and water they consume each year. U.S., Canadian and Australian authorities support this estimate as accurate (Majowicz et al., 2006; Mead et al., 1999; OzFoodNet Working Group, 2003) through estimations from available data and adjustments for underreporting. WHO has identified five factors of food handling that contribute to these illnesses: improper cooking procedures; temperature abuse during storage; lack of hygiene and sanitation by food handlers; cross-contamination between raw and fresh ready to eat foods; and, acquiring food from unsafe sources.

    Oh, and that logo (upper right) is going to be retired in January when we relaunch everything.

    Majowicz, S.E., McNab, W.B., Sockett, P., Henson, S., Dore, K., Edge, V.L., Buffett, M.C., Fazil, A., Read, S. McEwen, S., Stacey, D. and Wilson, J.B. (2006), “Burden and cost of gastroenteritis in a Canadian community”, Journal of Food Protection, Vol. 69, pp. 651-659.

    Mead, P.S., Slutsjer, L., Dietz, V., McCaig, L.F., Breeses, J.S., Shapiro, C., Griffin, P.M. and Tauxe, R.V. (1999), “Food-related illness and death in the United States”, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Vol. 5, pp. 607-625.

    OzFoodNet Working Group. (2003), “Foodborne disease in Australia: Incidence, notifications and outbreaks: Annual report of the OzFoodNet Network, 2002”, Communicable Diseases Intelligence, Vol. 27, pp. 209-243.
     

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    Farm-to-fork, Ifsn, Whole Foods, World Health Organization