Hand hygiene promotion during epidemics and pandemics of respiratory infections
Citation: Veys K, Dockx K, Van Remoortel H, et al. The effect of hand hygiene promotion programs during epidemics and pandemics of respiratory droplet-transmissible infections on health outcomes: a rapid systematic review. BMC Public Health. 2021;21:1745.
Language: Abstract and full text available in EN.
Free to view: Yes.
Funding sources: The authors reported that they had no external funding for this review.
What is this: During the COVID-19 pandemic, hand hygiene has been one of the primary recommendations.
In this rapid systematic review, the authors searched for the effectiveness of programmes that promoted community-based hand hygiene to improve health outcomes. They searched until August 2021 for controlled experimental studies published in English. The authors included 12 randomised trials from Bangladesh (1), Egypt (1), Finland (1), Germany (2), Hong Kong (2), Thailand (1), and the USA (4). All of the included studies assessed hand hygiene activities for influenza, nine were included in the meta-analyses.
What works: In a school setting, preventive hand hygiene led to a significant decrease in influenza cases between epidemics, and hourly hand sanitising reduced absenteeism among kindergarten children during an influenza epidemic.
What doesn’t work: Hand hygiene promotion did not reduce the number of influenza cases when introduced to households that already included one positive case.
What’s uncertain: The additional effect of hand hygiene promotion when combined with the use of facemasks on the number of influenza cases in a household or university setting could not be demonstrated.
Implications: The authors concluded that the implementation of hand hygiene interventions regardless of the presence of infection can improve health outcomes.
Other considerations: The authors of the review discussed their findings in the context of place of residence and age.
This summary was checked by Sneha Bhadti, and finalized by William Summerskill.