Hygiene

Hygiene is something that you need to think about every day!  It help you to look, feel and smell good but also helps to stop infections or disease spreading from person-to-person or from place-to-place!  Personal hygiene is very easy and is something your probably do every day anyway!  It just means washing yourself properly, making sure you cover your mouth and nose when you sneeze or cough so you don’t spread microbes, storing and handling food properly and throwing away anything that might have microbes on it, like used tissues.

Why do you need to wash every day?  There are bacteria that live on your skin, especially in areas that are warm and dark, like under your arms.  When you sweat, the bacteria as very happy as they use the sweat to make more bacteria!  Bacteria make waste products as they do this and it is this that makes the body odour (‘BO’) smell. Other smells that may be on your body from the food you eat or the mud you have played in can smell bad.  Luckily, just washing with soap and water will get rid of this smell so it is very easy to stay clean! Remember to include you hair and teeth in your daily hygiene routine - good hygiene makes you look, smell and feel better!

A lot of infections are spread by people being very lazy about hygiene.  Did you know that microbes from your hand can hang around on anything you touch?  If they aren’t cleaned away, the next person to touch that thing can pick them up and get sick?  That thing could be a door handle or it could be food!  The best way to avoid passing on microbes is to wash your hands all over, very often.  You really need to do this every time you use the toilet, prepare or eat food, sneeze or cough, touch something dirty or play with your pets.  You can get really sick really quick if you don’t wash your hands!

It is no use washing and not changing your clothes, especially your socks and underwear!  Bacteria especially love your socks and shoes so make sure that you keep them very clean, change your socks every day.  If your shoes do get smelly, try leaving them outside (not in the rain!) so that the sweat in your shoes dries completely.  When your sweat dries completely, the bacteria will have nothing to survive on so the bacteria should die and you’ll get rid of the smell!  If this doesn’t work, three are lots of products in the supermarket that might help!  Your clothes will get dirty as well, just through every day activities.  Make sure to keep your clothes clean, especially your sports gear – learn how to use the washing machine (ask an adult) and wash and change your clothes as often as you need to.

Hygiene doesn’t just mean that you keep yourself clean – you need to keep your environment clean too.  You need to make sure all the cooking and eating utensils in your kitchen are very clean, that your bathroom is always clean and that you don’t leave food or drinks lying around your living and sleeping space.  You also need to be tidy so that it is easier to clean and that your bedclothes are cleaned often (remember, you sweat into your pyjamas and your sheets every night!).

There are lots of other really easy things you can do to make sure you don’t get ill from your environment.  For example, remember to store raw food away from cooked food and in the fridge, you always put cooked meat above raw meat.  If you have raw meat higher up, raw juices could drip down onto the cooked food.  Don’t use the same knife to cut raw and cooked food – this could make you very ill indeed!  Make sure the temperature of your fridge and freezer is correct and don’t leave food sitting around, store it properly!  And remember, if something from the freezer has been thawed, don’t put it back in the freezer, cook it and eat it!

Microbes are everywhere and some of them are very good for us.  However, if you let them get out of control, they can make life very unpleasant!  You can’t see microbes, but you sometimes know they are there because they smell bad or food goes rotten or they grow so big (there are so many of them) that you can actually see them without a microscope!  Remember to keep yourself and your environment clean and you are well on your way to a hygienic life!