Clean hands are the single most important factor in preventing the spread of dangerous germs and antibiotic resistance in health care settings," said Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the CDC in Atlanta.

Nosocomial infections have been recognized as a critical problem in modern medicine and are associated with the quality of health care provided in human hospitals. On average, 7 - 10% of hospitalized patients acquire an infection after hospital admission. A substantial proportion is the result of crosscontamination. Transmission of micro-organisms by the hands of health care workers was the main cause of spreading disease. During 2002 the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) experts known as the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC) issued a revised document

“Hand Hygiene in Healthcare: Playing by the New Rules” Hand hygiene includes terms such as hand washing, antiseptic hand wash, hand-rub and surgical hand antisepsis. We have incorporated the main points of these recommendations into our practice guidelines.

Even though it is well documented that proper hand washing can result in statistically significant reductions in patient morbidity and mortality from nosocomial infections and further that hand washing with antimicrobial agents significantly reduces the number of potential pathogens carried on hands, recent studies in health care facilities indicate that hand washing practices are less than optimal (Larson et al. 1995).

During our training sessions with veterinary support staff we found that many only washed their hands ONCE a day - just before going off duty. Factors leading to non-compliance include time constraints, lack of hand washing facilities and ignorance regarding the importance of this procedure.

It is even more surprising that some knowledgeable professionals disregard hand washing guidance in favour of more casual hand washing practices. It is recognized that antiseptic hand washing, including the surgical scrub, is a very repetitive, tedious, mundane and sometimes painful task!

The CDC guideline also highlights the fact that none of the traditional chemical agents used for hand hygiene

are sporicidal against Bacillus anthracis or Clostridium difficile. These gram positive, anaerobic, spore forming motile rod bacteria are now considered endemic in most UK and USA hospitals and have already caused more deaths than the notorious organism MRSA.

F10 has proven efficacy against Bacillus spp. It was recently tested against Clostridium difficile at the SABS microbiology laboratories and completely eliminated a log5 challenge at a concentration of 1:250 of F10SC (this is less than the level of actives in the hand soaps).

For those of you who already use the F10 Hand Hygiene products as part of our practice hygiene package - well done! For those who still believe that chlorhexidine and povidone iodine are the only skin antiseptics out there - please read on!

A rational approach in the selection and use of a product for hand hygiene in veterinary practice is necessary to achieve more than just dried and cracked hands. There are dozens of different disinfectant soaps and gels/rubs on the market made up of different chemical ingredients; some are more effective than others at killing certain microbes, however few are really broad spectrum and some have significant drawbacks in terms of safety to the user. Hand hygiene can be damaging to the skin of staff which will result in poor compliance and in turn increases the risk of cross infection. Therefore the product selected for use must be acceptable to the staff!

CDC studies have determined that the size of the microbial challenge on the intact areas of skin for health care worker can vary from 100 to 6 million microbes per cm2. In recent efficacy tests F10 has shown significant depth of performance by achieving > log6 (> 1,000,000) reduction in microbial counts when tested in accordance with the AOAC (USA) Standard against Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella choleraesuis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Now THAT'S test data I've not seen the “traditional” products achieve! And, as required for this extremely demanding protocol, F10 did it for 180 repeats.