Blog 9: School 'Hand Hygiene' Plan Shows No Asthma Benefit, Jennifer Wall October 25 2012 11:45pm

A research study was recently conducted in a county school system in Alabama to determine how effective “hand hygiene” plans were in reducing the rate of asthma attacks in school children. The hand hygiene plans were designed to teach children about hand hygiene and hand washing as well as to encourage the children to use alcohol based hand sanitizers provided in the schools. The idea behind the study was that the use of the hand sanitizers and increased hand hygiene education would help reduce the triggers that cause children to have asthma attacks. The results of the study indicated that there was no real benefit to the use of such a plan, especially in regards to using the hand sanitizers. The problem with the study was that right after it was started, the H1N1 swine flu broke out and most schools started to rely heavily on the use of hand sanitizers. This basically took away the research study’s control group. Since the control group was no longer there, the results could be argued to no longer be valid. Even so, the study suggests that general hand washing should be just as effective at preventing asthma attacks as the more intensive hand hygiene plan with heavily hand sanitizer use.

Asthma is a disease that affects people everywhere and in all cultures. For this reason, it would be considered a global problem. Finding a way to help prevent children from having attacks would affect children around the world. Even though there was an issue with the study, it appears clear that the extensive use of alcohol based hand sanitizers are not affective in preventing the asthma attacks. My personal feeling is that these hand sanitizers are being overused and instead of helping, they are actually going to cause more problems. In order to build up our immune systems, we need to be exposed to the everyday germs around us. These hand sanitizers are everywhere now and people are constantly using them. This kills all of the germs and prevents us from being exposed to them. This lack of exposure will eventually make is so that our bodies do not know how to fight against them when exposure does happen.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/sns-rt-us-school-handbre89n1mc-20121024,0,6930696.story