Revealed: the filthy hand washing habits of office workers... and it isn't just men at fault

..but men ARE the worst offenders, research shows
Dirty: Nearly two-thirds of men and some 40 per cent of women don't wash hands (Picture: Jason Hosking/Corbis)
Lucy Tobin27 February 2015

Think twice before shaking a colleague’s hand. New research of the bathroom habits of 100,000 office workers today revealed that just 38 per cent of men and 60 per cent of women washed their hands after using the toilet.

Pest control firm Rentokil Initial discovered the dirty news - which puts people at risk of cross contamination and illness - by putting sensors on toilet doors and on hand wash dispensers to monitor their usage.

It then reported the anonymous levels of 100,000 workers’ washing patterns to them and their employers in real-time via LCD monitors.

The firm found publicly-shaming non-washers helped drive up hand washing rates dramatically.

Compliance rose to 90 per cent within two days of the data being displayed, before stabilising to between about 82 per cent.

Rentokil is now selling its new alert-system to firms, with those in the food, health, education sectors expected to be most interested as well as among employers in large offices who want to cut absenteeism due to infectious diseases like colds and flu.

"Good hand hygiene is essential in some industries, such as food processing, but it also helps stop the spread of disease in everyday life," said Rentokil’s Stewart Power.

"One day every washroom will have some sort of monitoring system to give us that nudge to wash our hands."

A national hand hygiene campaign launched two years ago cut superbug infections, according to NHS findings.

Their study of hand-washing practices at 187 NHS trusts in England and Wales examined purchases of alcohol hand rub and liquid soap by hospitals against statistics for common hospital-acquired infections such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile or C. difficile.

They found that the total amount of soap and alcohol gel being purchased by hospitals tripled across the four years of the study, from 22ml per patient per day to 60ml per patient per day, and over the same period, rates of MRSA more than halved and C. difficile infections fell by more than 40%.

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