Training in hand hygiene and disinfection may be a simple, cheap way to reduce infectious illness
Good knowledge of hand hygiene among students reduces school absenteeism, researchers report.
The study included 324 elementary school students, aged 5 to 14, in Denmark. The children were given a lesson in hand disinfection theory and practice and told to disinfect their hands using ethanol gel three times each school day.
During the three-month study, there was a 66 percent decrease in students who were absent for four or more days and a 20 percent increase in children with zero absences, compared to the previous school year, the investigators found.
"Regular training in [hand washing] and [hand disinfection] would be a simple, low-cost action with very significant impact on reducing infectious illness absence periods among pupils," stated study author and infection preventionist Inge Nandrup-Bus, in a news release from the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology.
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