Touch It Once, Take It Everywhere.

Touch It Once, Take It Everywhere.
Our fingers collect, carry and pass along each microscopic bit of virus, bacteria and lots of other unpleasant things that can make us and everyone we meet sick. The financial cost to companies from illnesses being passed among employees averages more than $3,275 annually for every 50 workers.
By Isaac Rudik

Fingers are so important and useful, every human and primate striding the earth has had 10 of them for more than 3-million years. From making crude tools to doing intricate brain surgery to lovingly stroking the face of a newborn, they are so indispensable few people give them second thought.

But, as with many things in nature, along with the good comes bad. Our fingers – and the hands they’re attached to – also collect, carry and pass along each microscopic bit of virus, bacteria, germs and lots of other nasty things that can make us and everyone we meet sick. And it doesn’t even need to be hand-to-hand contact: We grasp an object such as a door handle that someone else touches later and the bad guys happily move onto a new host.

The H1N1 pandemic is an object lesson in the importance of remembering to do things we were taught as kids: Wash your hands frequently. But the fact is, few people know how to do so properly – if they do it at all; as a result, we don’t kill germs. Along with people working in highly vulnerable sectors such as health care, hospitals, food processing and the corner grocery store, workers in nearly every organisation need to be aware of sanitising their hands regularly.

After all, 90% of contamination comes from hands and fingers.

Spreading Infections

The most blatant problem is in the health care sector, where hospital acquired infections reached epidemic proportions until attention to the problem was put under the spotlight.

The problem became so bad, recently Medicare in the US announced it will stop reimbursing hospitals for treating these infections. Hospitals are barred from billing patients for what Medicare doesn't pay, forcing them to take a loss. This year, Medicare added a long list of other types of infections to its list of "never events" – things that shouldn’t be making patients sick when they’re in hospital recovering from something else.

Courts are paying attention, too. A jury awarded over $2.5-million to a couple in a
medical malpractice lawsuit against a heart surgeon, his group practice and a St. Louis Missouri hospital. The man was rushed to hospital with a heart attack and a pacemaker was surgically implanted. He developed a drug resistant staph infection. It was so severe the man had to undergo 15 additional operations, spent 84 days in hospital and lost his right leg, part of his left foot, a kidney and most of his hearing.

All this happened because the doctors and health care workers as well as the company that made the implanted device were careless about sanitizing their hands and the products those hands made.

Beyond Hospitals

But the problem isn’t limited to careless medical staff, and shrugging off the issue as being unimportant to businesses.

One estimate put the financial cost to every company in every industry as a result of illnesses being passed from one employee to another at an average of more than $3,275 per year for every 50 workers. So a business with 200 employees is losing more than $13,000 annually simply because workers don’t sanitize their hands frequently during the day. The cost is even higher in businesses where employees handle food and, worse, they risk passing germs and infections along to consumers as was seen in recent problems with tomatoes from Mexico, and both peanuts and spinach from the US.

Stationing hand sanitizers in key places around a facility is an important first step. But it’s equally critical to test the effectiveness and strength of the sanitizing fluid on a regular basis.

Titrimetric kits verify the concentration of a sanitizer quickly and easily. They allow a business to validate the power of its liquid sanitizer with colorimetric kits, which contain re-agents for 50 tests. The test saves money by avoiding the sanitizer being too concentrated while at the same time ensuring it’s not too weak to do the job.

Thanks to our eons-old fingers and hands, people take whatever they touch with them. When going from one department to another, hand sanitizers at doors and passageways leave germs where they came from. Testing to ensure that sanitizers are working at the proper strength reduces the likelihood of spreading sickness – and costing the company money.





Isaac Rudik is a compliance consultant with Compliance Solutions Canada Inc. (www.compliancesolutionscanada.com), Canada’s largest provider of health, safety and environmental compliance solutions to industrial, institutional and government facilities.

E-mail Isaac at irudik@csc-inc.ca or phone him at 905-761-5354.