Washing Hands and Changing Habits

In the Washing Hands article the piece that stuck out to me the most was in paragraph 4 where it talks about how 20% of mothers who delivered in a hospital died due to bacterial infections and whereas only 1% of who delivered at home were affected. This surpirsed me because I would have thought that having a child in a hospital would have been the safest and most santiatry place. I would like to think that even though we all keep our homes "clean" that many would not find it cleaner than the hospital and the sad part is that your home clearly is cleaner and it all starts with just washing your hands. The process of washing ones hand seem much more extensive than many of us probably actually do as well. For example, it says that you should remove all jewelry and wash at least up 1/3 of your arm. Then you have to use like three different paper towels just to ensure that you haven't come into contact with any new bacteria before seeing a new patient and then the process is repeated. After reading an article like this I really begin to over analyze every simple dialy task that I think about and recently I have not become a germiphobe, but I do notice myself thinking, "Wow! I wonder how many other people have touched this handrail, door handle, keyboard, pen...." And the list goes on and on. We come into contact with so many different things and people that I don't think many people realize to wash their hands before they grab that burger and put all those germs in their mouth. It is for reasons like this that your mouth is probably the dirtiest place on the body.

I think that changing habits is often so hard for people because as many times as we are told the correct way once a certain age is reached it is hard to remember until after you have already done it the wrong way and then many people think there is no point to go back and correct it beause you will do it next. But then then next time you say that and the cycle jsut keeps repeating itself. One cna change just by making sure that they practice good habits and whenver you do it the wrong way you do it again so you will remember the right way. I liketo think of recycling when it comes to change becasue many people know its the right thing to do and it doesn't take that much longer to do it right and set up a system, but people will still just throw all the trash in the same bin. This is one of the reasons that we are not moving ahead on the whole "Go Green" effort.