“Fight antibiotic resistance … it’s in your hands”

2 May 2017, Cairo – World Hand Hygiene Day, marked globally on 5 May, highlights the importance of hand hygiene in health care. The slogan of this year’s campaign is “Fight antibiotic resistance … it’s in your hands”, illustrating the important relationship between good infection prevention and control practices like washing your hands and preventing antibiotic resistance.    World Hand Hygiene Day plays an important role in highlighting good infection prevention and control practices to change behaviours to reduce the spread of infections and therefore save the lives of millions. Without behaviour change, antibiotic resistance will remain a major threat. Through this year’s campaign, the World Health Organization (WHO) is calling on countries and health care facilities to strengthen infection prevention and control programmes based on WHO guidelines on core components of infection prevention and control programmes. A key component of which is adequate hand hygiene, which plays a critical role in combating antimicrobial resistance. “Health care-associated infections are one of the most frequent adverse events in health care delivery and are a major public health problem that affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide,” says Dr Mahmoud Fikri, WHO Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean.  One out of every 10 patients gets an infection while receiving care, and up to 32% of patients receiving surgical care get a post-operative i...
Source: WHO EMRO News - Category: Middle East Health Source Type: news