Coronavirus underscores important of handwashing and hand hygiene

Down a long hallway at Beaumont Hospital's Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in Royal Oak, every visit starts with a long hand-washing session. It has nothing to do with vanity. It's about survival.

New parents and visitors are asked to scrub their hands for specific length of time with a special soap before it's OK to visit a baby. Vanquishing unseen germs when you're dealing with fragile immune systems is imperative.

I can still smell that hospital soap more than 15 years after my first child came into the world eight weeks early. Every time I visit a hospital the scent hits my nostrils and takes my right back to that NICU. 

But the reality is hand-washing wasn't welcomed in hospitals a century and a half ago. In fact, when a Hungarian doctor made the connection between women dying in a Vienna maternity ward of what was then called "childbed fever" and unclean doctors' hands, he lost his job and was later deemed crazy.

We've come a long way since that when it comes to hygiene, but the importance of washing our hands to ward off germs is even more important these days as we prepare ourselves for an outbreak of coronavirus on American soil.

As of Thursday afternoon, 11 people in the U.S. had already died of COVID-19. And while there have been no confirmed cases of the virus in Michigan at this point, experts say it's not a matter of if the virus will make its way throughout the United State but when.

And what's one of the best ways to project yourself? Wash your hands, experts say. The Oakland County Health Division recommends washing your hands often with soap and water for 20 seconds, and helping your young kids to do the same. If soap and water are aren't available, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

It's hard to imagine, but a century ago no one understood the connection between hygiene and health care.

Ignaz Semmelweis was a doctor in Hungry in 1846. Working in the maternity ward of Vienna's General Hospital, he wondered why so many new mothers were dying of puerperal fever, or childbed fever.

According to an article by NPR, Semmelweis studied the mortality rate of a clinic staffed by doctors and another with midwives. The clinic staffed by doctors had a rate five times higher than the midwives.

After ruling out several different factors -- women giving birth on their sides at one clinic, versus on their backs at another -- he realized doctors were doing autopsies at one place and then delivering babies. And they didn't wash their hands in between.

Semmelweis ordered staff to wash their hands and instruments using soap and a chlorine solution. With the hand-washing policy in place, the mortality rate fell "dramatically" to 3%, according to the National Institute of Health.

But Semmelweis's colleagues weren't happy with his suggestion that they played a role in their patients' deaths. He eventually lost his job and doctors ignored his suggestions. He was committed to an insane asylum in 1865. 

In fact, it wasn't until the 1980s, according to the National Institute of Health, that hand hygiene was really fully embraced in health care when the first national hand hygiene guidelines were published. 

So as Americans dash to stock up on water, sanitizer and bleach, start with the basics in fighting the virus: wash your hands.

mfeighan@detroitnews.com