The potential impact of intensified community hand hygiene interventions on respiratory tract infections: a modelling study.

ABSTRACT: Hand hygiene is among the most fundamental and widely used behavioural measures to reduce the person-to-person spread of human pathogens and its effectiveness as a community intervention is supported by evidence from randomized trials. However, a theoretical understanding of the relationship between hand hygiene frequency and change in risk of infection is lacking. Using a simple model-based framework for understanding the determinants of hand hygiene effectiveness in preventing viral respiratory tract infections, we show that a crucial, but overlooked, determinant of the relationship between hand hygiene frequency and risk of infection via indirect transmission is persistence of viable virus on hands. If persistence is short, as has been reported for influenza, hand-washing needs to be pe

SUBMITTER: Pham TM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9092223 | biostudies-literature | 2022 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature