WORLD HAND WASH DAY-2022

 Unite for safety: clean your hands

Theme For Hand Hygiene Day 2022

This year, WHO is marking the day with the theme – Unite for safety: clean your hands, with a focus on encouraging people to clean hands at the right times with the right products that will help lead to high quality safer care everywhere.

WHO Calls To Action This Year

WHO calls upon people at all levels to work together to create an environment where clean hands knowledge and behaviour become a part of the culture at the point of care, among healthcare workers even within health care organization.It also calls upon the patients and the general public to clean their hands frequently and adopt it as a habit.

Importance Of Hand Hygiene

WHO states:

– The leading causes of death in children under-5 years are preterm birth complications, pneumonia, congenital anomalies, diarrhoea and malaria, all of which can be prevented or treated with access to simple, affordable interventions following good like hand hygiene and safe water

– It further states the staggering figures of deaths and adds, in 2019 an estimated 5.2 million children under 5 years died mostly from preventable and treatable causes

– Children aged 1 to 11 months accounted for 1.5 millions of these deaths while children aged 1 to 4 years accounted for 1.3 million deaths

– Newborns (under 28 days) accounted for the remaining 2.4 million deaths

– And an additional 500,000 older children (5 to 9 years) died in 2019

– Half of all under-five deaths in 2019 occurred in just five countries: Nigeria, India, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia and Nigeria and India alone accounted for almost a third of all deaths