Washing hands after nappy change - MIL thread, sorry

[StarlingMurmuration]

My PIL are staying with us at the moment to look after DS, after I have had an operation. I appreciate is is very generous and lovely of them, and I am grateful.

However, MIL isn't washing her hands after pooey nappy changes. AIBU to be bothered by this? How can I get her to do this without basically implying she's being disgusting? We do have hand sanitizer at the nappy change station, but I found she as using that BEFORE she changed his nappy instead of after! DS is 8 months old, just for info, and my operation means I can't lift or carry him, or bend over/ kneel down, so I can't do it myself at the moment.

This thread is getting worse, i can't take it. I am out of here. Hands in Head, eye rolls, shaking head, considering running a campaign to educate the dirty minger brigade, the lot

Bloody hell, that's an eye opener.
I always pegged myself as a bit lax in the hygiene stakes, but not washing hands after changing a shitty nappy is disgusting!
Those saying "but you don't see people at baby groups racing off to wash hands after changing nappies" - surely they change the nappies in the baby change unit/toilets? You know - where they also have conveniently placed handwashing sinks?
No wonder that bloody woman thought it was fine to change shitty nappy on sofa in cafe - if you're not going to wash hands afterwards, you may as well smear it all around a bit.
And yes - diff types and quantities of germs - you can't build up tolerance to all human faeces germs fgs!

Please wash your hands.

please, please, wash your hands. I have a toilet brush, only wash my sheets once a week and towels even less often but even I think this is minging. Don't you non-hand washers realise that bacteria are microscopic. Just because you can't see poo on your hands, doesn't mean they are clean.

yogababybum, I think the tide has turned. After these few pages' worth of the handwashers' tsunami, no-one else is going to chime in against hand-washing!

I think sometimes I did and sometimes I didn't. I can't really remember but it probably depended on whether I had access to a sink, and whether or not I'd got crap on my fingers.

I'm loving some of the OTT horror and mortification here though

Yeah the responses are definitely a bit OTT, not to mention the amount of people who are strangely refusing to eat any homemade cakes. Why would you even make that link?!

Just because someone doesn't think they touched anything germy doesn't mean there aren't plenty of times they did.

Thinking you're avoiding touching the dirty bits of nappies might mean YANBU not to panic if you unavoidably can't wash your hands after a particular nappy change. In no way does it justify a policy of not washing them!

Unless they're a robot with a few extra arms, no one is that perfect at not ever brushing their fingers on any dirty bit of a nappy or bottom during a nappy change.

Handwashing and toilet hygiene wouldn't have prevented all the diseases they have globallly if the rule was "wash your hands only if you think you touched anything pooey, otherwise, nah, you're fine, don't bother".

The whole point is that it takes that unreliable judgement out of the equation, so it should mean that everyone leaves a bathroom with clean hands, regardless of how good or bad they are at judging or remembering what they've touched. Nobody's perfect!

I'm not much of a hand washer TBH. Can't get worked up about it. Haven't been ill in years. I'm sure more exposure to germs makes you more resistant (no idea if scientific but that's my experience).

I don't have the energy to get worked up because there might be a germ on a piece of cake I'm eating. Doesn't make any difference, does it?! Really?

Same, I don't really wash my hands unless they get smeared.

Pretty grim I know but my hands seem to be in the washing up bowl at least 5 hours a day so I don't see the point.

Also do people who wash their hands after they touch animals have pets? I have two cats and I couldn't possibly wash my hands every time I touched them, I would have a shrivelled up bit of skin instead of a hand!

Lighten up, touching a dog/cat/rabbit/whatever isn't going to make you sick. Unless you're allergic.

I'd rather my DC were a bit gross than obsessed with cleanliness TBH, if it has to go one way or the other.

If they were rubbing on hand sanitiser every 3 seconds I would feel quite sorry for them.

Haven't read the whole thread, so this may have been covered.

As a disclaimer, I'm a hand washer myself. But from what I can see, the non hand washers are not plagued with constant illness/families at death's door.

Can't be that big a deal - can we all calm down

Late to the thread but whaaaaaaaatttt!? Why would you not wash your hands? Disgusting.

Confused I wasn't saying that was obsessive, no (I do wash my hands the majority of the time, unless I forget) - I was saying it is a bit ridiculous to get all hysterical over it.

I do think it's obsessive to wash your hands every time you touch an animal.

bluejeans, because the faecal germs that aren't being washed off will end up spread over the homes of the people who don't wash their hands. That means that lots of surfaces that shouldn't have any of that type of bacteria on them will have them, and that's then a much less clean and safe environment for preparing food.

Homemade cakes are the one thing we regularly eat from the homes of complete strangers, when they're brought to fetes and cake sales, and eating them depends on a level of trust and assumption that the people who've made them have done so in a clean and safe kitchen with clean hands.

I thought variations in basic kitchen cleanliness and the participation of lovely but snotty small children in the cakemaking made it enough of a gamble (one reason I tend to go for the ones that clearly have had no child involved and avoid the ones with endearingly odd designs hand-squished onto the top by small children).

I honestly never thought that this many people would also be changing nappies and not bothering to wash their hands. If I'd thought about it at all I'd have thought the people who didn't wash their hands after nappy changes would be a very small group and unlikely to overlap that much with the cake makers. Clearly I was very naive!

Well, are the non hand washers ill? Sicker than the hand washers? If not then there is an awful lot of evidence that it's pointless.

There is (appropriately) a shit load of evidence that hand washing reduces infection rates. It's why HCPs wear gloves and wash hands rigorously.

This is from the World Health Organisation and explains why hand washing is important in a clinical setting but it directly relates to why it is important in the home. The list of bugs carried by ordinary people and where they tend to collect is fascinating. Perineum and groins would be pertinent in this discussion. Please note that this is about how HCP's can pick up bugs from ordinary people not just people with an infectious illness. www.who.int/gpsc/tools/faqs/evidence_hand_hygiene/en/

This one is a study specially about hand hygiene and infection diseases in the home: www.ajicjournal.org/article/S0196-6553(07)00595-0/abstract

But really, for the sake of one minute why wouldn't you wash your hands? It's hardly arduous and in the winter when my some people's hands get terribly cracked make sure you dry them properly and use an emollient because it will help.

Come now Laurie. Do you really think that flu epidemic would have swept through Kingscote so quickly if everyone had been assiduous about washing their hands? I'm sure your and your sisters' careful handwashing is why you were all Psalm 91, verse 7.

My 2 yr old can't stand sticky hands and chases me around begging me to wash it. He will only do one hand! If I try wash both we have a meltdown. He's toilet training now and also wants only one hand done each time and sometimes I have to chase him round yelling as he touches everything in sight. That is after he has flushed the toilet in my face as I bend down to pull up his pants. Sigh. It is genuinely impossible to always avoid poo, pee, toilet splash etc with kids and animals.

For all those getting worked up about touching animals

There's good evidence that communities who live in very close proximity with household animals have much lower levels of allergies & hay fever.

Our immune systems evolved over millions of years when humans lived in mud huts with no access to running water. A few dog hairs are not exactly the end of the world

If you don't mind having poo on your hands after using the toilet/changing nappies, that's fine but don't think it isn't there just because you can't see/smell it.

Basic hand hygiene does keep us safe from the spread of disease.

Widespread food poisoning that kills small children gets traced back to people who haven't washed their hands, presumably because they didn't think they have shit on them. I would imagine these are probably people who were brought up in families where hand-washing is seen as a bit OTT unless you can actually see the dirt on your hands or know for a fact that you've made physical contact with poo.

If you don't mind spreading faeces around your own home, that's fine too (well apart from your poor visitors) but it might be nice to consider the vulnerable people you could infect elsewhere, e.g. immunosuppressed people, very young babies, the elderly. By reducing the number of bacteria on your hands, you are helping to keep other people safe. They and their carers need to minimise the risks too, of course, but good hand hygiene is like vaccination. The more people do it, the safer the most vulnerable members of our society are.