Hand Hygiene to prevent COVID-19 spread - M.A.Aleem Neurologist #Trichy #Tamilnadu #India

Hand Hygiene 

Hand wash is culturally , traditionally and religiously is adopted my many in the community . This is also hygienic and it can prevent the fecal-oral route transmitted  diseases and the respiratory route of spreading diseases like COVID-19 .

COVID-19 is a respiratory viral illness, meaning it is mostly spread through virus-laden droplets from coughs and sneezes. If you don’t catch your coughs and sneezes in a hygenic way , the virus can end up on surfaces. If someone else touches that contaminated surface, the virus can transfer onto their hand.

If you have the virus on your hands, you can infect yourself by touching your eyes, mouth or nose. You might think that you don’t touch your face very often, but it’s much more than you realise. A  study found that people touch their faces an average of 23 times an hour.

So washing your hands is useful in preventing yourself from getting infected.

It also help to stop the spread spread of COVID-19.  When it comes to stopping the spread of the serious infection in this country, the public have a huge role to play.

COVID-19 is an ‘enveloped virus’. This means it has a protective outer layer known as a ‘lipid bilayer’. The molecules making up this layer are shaped like a tadpole, with a water-loving (hydrophilic) round head and a water-hating (hydrophobic) tail.

These molecules arrange themselves into a ‘bilayer’: two layers piled on top of each other into a sheet, with tails pointing inwards and heads pointing outwards.

The molecules are pulled closely into each other to protect the hydrophobic tails from the water in your respiratory droplets when you cough or sneeze.

The hydrophilic heads are very ‘sticky’, meaning the virus is very effective at sticking to your hands – perfect for a microbe that’s trying very hard to infect you.

Soap molecules also have this tadpole structure, which is what makes it so useful. When you have something oily on your hands, running water won’t get rid of it. Add soap to your hands – the hydrophobic tail will cling to the oil, and the hydrophilic head will stick to the water. Now, the oil will come straight off.

Because the soap molecules are so similar to the ones making up the outer layer of the virus, the molecules in the lipid bilayer are as strongly attracted to soap molecules as they are to each other.

This disrupts the neatly-ordered shell around the virus, dissolving it in the running water and killing the virus

Alcohol-based hand sanitiser will also kill the viruses if soap and water are not available. Alcohol is an antiseptic and can kill enveloped viruses such as COVID-19, but make sure it contains 60 to 95 per cent alcohol.

However, if your hands are visibly dirty, you need to

 use soap and running water to clean the dirt off.

So hand hygiene by frequent washing hands with soap water or alcohol based sanitizer can kill the COVID-19 and help to break the chain of COVID-19 spread