Hygienic practices -
Caring for your teeth and gums is a smart way to prevent gum diseases and cavities. Brush at least twice a day for 2 minutes.
Aim to brush after you wake up and before bed. If you can, brush after every meal, too. Floss between your teeth daily, and ask your dentist about using an antibacterial mouthwash.
These two steps can help prevent tooth decay and eliminate pockets where bacteria and germs can build up.
This includes covering your mouth and nose when sneezing, wiping down shared surfaces with an antibacterial wipe, and not sharing any utensils or electronics.
Also, immediately throw away any soiled tissues. Germs on your hands can easily enter your body through your mouth, nose, eyes, or ears. Wash your hands:. Good personal hygiene will help your kids stay healthy, ward off illnesses, and build better self-awareness.
This helps you begin the process and slowly teaches them as they grow and take over the process. They can brush their own teeth by about 3 years old. You can also use this time to teach them how to wash their hair without getting suds in their eyes — and what to do if they do.
During potty training , make washing hands an integral step in the process. Encourage your children to wash under their nails at each shower — a fun nail brush will help. Then, sit down with them weekly after a shower for a trim.
Your nails are softer and clip more easily after a shower. Good personal hygiene habits are directly related to less illnesses and better health. Poor personal hygiene habits, however, can lead to some minor side effects, like body odor and greasy skin.
They can also lead to more troublesome or even serious issues. This can lead to any number of issues, from stomach viruses to pink eye. Not brushing your teeth can lead to teeth issues and plaque buildup. Poor dental care is also a risk factor for several serious health issues, including heart disease.
Poor hygiene habits can also affect your self-esteem. Looking and feeling presentable can give you a confidence boost and a sense of pride in your appearance. Other conditions may be prevented or the risk minimized by practicing good personal hygiene. These are some examples:. If you want to improve your personal hygiene or help a child develop better habits, these strategies might be helpful:.
Hang a reminder in the bathroom to wash your hands after using the toilet. Put a little sign by the plates or bowls in the kitchen to cue yourself to wash your hands before eating. These signs can help jog your memory and improve your habits.
They can help both you and your children. If you buy through links on this page, we may earn a small commission. Healthline only shows you brands and products that we stand behind.
Small changes in habits can make a big difference. Wondering what constitutes bad hygiene, or trying to figure out if your hygiene habits are lacking? Take a minty fresh breath, and rest assured that some supposed bad hygiene traits are actually NBD — like peeing in the shower , for instance. But it matters when it affects your life or that of the people around you.
In the most extreme cases, when left unattended, poor hygiene can breed disease that can affect you or others. For example, not washing your hands after you use the toilet, handle food , or touch dirty surfaces can spread bacteria, viruses, and parasites.
These can lead to infections and diseases, like food poisoning , gastroenteritis , cold and flu, and hepatitis A — just to name a few. Poor dental hygiene can lead to tooth decay and gum disease , which can also affect the heart.
Not bathing can result in a skin condition called dermatitis neglecta and secondary infections. Some companies have a hygiene policy in place for the protection of employees and company image, especially if you have a public-facing role. For some, lack of access to clean water, soap, or cleaning supplies can make proper hygiene more difficult to achieve.
Adrienne Santos-Longhurst is a Canada-based freelance writer and author who has written extensively on all things health and lifestyle for more than a decade. Our experts continually monitor the health and wellness space, and we update our articles when new information becomes available.
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Get examples of each and see how they…. Racial bias in healthcare takes many forms. This approach has been integrated into the Sustainable Development Goal Number 6 whose second target states: "By , achieve access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and end open defecation , paying special attention to the needs of women and girls and those in vulnerable situations".
About two million people die every year due to diarrheal diseases; most of them are children less than five years of age.
Providing access to sufficient quantities of safe water and facilities for a sanitary disposal of excreta, and introducing sound hygiene behaviors are important in order to reduce the burden of disease. Research shows that, if widely practiced, hand washing with soap could reduce diarrhea by almost fifty percent [53] and respiratory infections by nearly twenty-five percent [54] Hand washing with soap also reduces the incidence of skin diseases, [55] and eye infections like trachoma and intestinal worms, especially ascariasis and trichuriasis.
Cleaning of toilets and hand wash facilities is important to prevent odors and make them socially acceptable. Social acceptance is an important part of encouraging people to use toilets and wash their hands, in situations where open defecation is still seen as a possible alternative, e.
in rural areas of some developing countries. Household water treatment and safe storage ensure drinking water is safe for consumption.
These interventions are part of the approach of self-supply of water for households. Point-of-use water quality interventions can reduce diarrheal disease in communities where water quality is poor or in emergency situations where there is a breakdown in water supply.
by contact with contaminated hands or using dirty storage vessels , safe storage of water in the home is important. Methods for treatment of drinking water at the household level include: [20] [62].
Bathing culture in Chinese literature can be traced back to the Shang dynasty — BCE , when Oracle bone inscriptions describe people washing their hair and body in a bath.
The Book of Rites , a work regarding Zhou dynasty — BCE ritual, politics, and culture compiled during the Warring States period , recommends that people take a hot shower every five days, and wash their hair every three days. It was also considered good manners to take a bath provided by the host before a dinner.
In the Han dynasty , bathing became a regular activity, and for government officials bathing was required every five days. Ancient bath facilities have been found in ancient Chinese cities, such as Dongzhouyang archaeological site in Henan Province. Bathrooms were called Bi Chinese : 湢 , and bathtubs were made of bronze or timber.
Bath beans were considered luxury toiletries, while common people simply used powdered beans without spices mixed in. Luxurious bathhouses built around hot springs were recorded in Tang dynasty. In the Song dynasty — CE , public bathhouses became popular and people could find them readily. Bathhouses often provided massage, nail cutting service, rubdown service, ear cleaning , food, and beverages.
A typical Ming dynasty bathhouse had slabbed floors and brick domed ceilings. A huge boiler would be installed in the back of the house, connected with the bathing pool through a tunnel. Water could be pumped into the pool by turning wheels attended by the staff. The origin of Japanese bathing is misogi , ritual purification with water.
In the Heian period — CE , houses of prominent families, such as the families of court nobles or samurai, had baths. The bath had lost its religious significance and instead became leisure.
Misogi became gyōzui to bathe in a shallow wooden tub. The earliest written account of elaborate codes of hygiene can be found in several Hindu texts, such as the Manusmriti and the Vishnu Purana.
Ayurveda is a system of medicine developed in ancient times that is still practiced in India, mostly combined with conventional Western medicine. Contemporary Ayurveda stresses a sattvic diet and good digestion and excretion. Hygiene measures include oil pulling , and tongue scraping.
Detoxification also plays an important role. Spanish chronicles describe the bathing habits of the peoples of Mesoamerica during and after the conquest.
Bernal Díaz del Castillo describes Moctezuma the Mexica, or Aztec , emperor at the arrival of Cortés in his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España as being " Very neat and cleanly, bathing every day each afternoon Bathing was not restricted to the elite, but was practiced by all people; the chronicler Tomás López Medel wrote after a journey to Central America that "Bathing and the custom of washing oneself is so quotidian [common] amongst the Indians, both of cold and hot lands, as is eating, and this is done in fountains and rivers and other water to which they have access, without anything other than pure water The Mesoamerican bath, known as temazcal in Spanish , from the Nahuatl word temazcalli , a compound of temaz "steam" and calli "house" , consists of a room, often in the form of a small dome, with an exterior firebox known as texictle teʃict͜ɬe that heats a small portion of the room's wall made of volcanic rocks; after this wall has been heated, water is poured on it to produce steam, an action known as tlasas.
As the steam accumulates in the upper part of the room a person in charge uses a bough to direct the steam to the bathers who are lying on the ground, with which he later gives them a massage, then the bathers scrub themselves with a small flat river stone and finally the person in charge introduces buckets with water along with soap and grass used to rinse.
This bath had also ritual importance, and was tied to the goddess Toci ; it is also therapeutic when medicinal herbs are used in the water for the tlasas. It is still used in Mexico. Regular bathing was a hallmark of Roman civilization.
The complexes usually consisted of large, swimming pool-like baths, smaller cold and hot pools, saunas, and spa-like facilities where people could be depilated, oiled, and massaged.
Water was constantly changed by an aqueduct -fed flow. Bathing outside of urban centers involved smaller, less elaborate bathing facilities, or simply the use of clean bodies of water.
Roman cities also had large sewers , such as Rome's Cloaca Maxima , into which public and private latrines drained. Romans did not have demand-flush toilets but did have some toilets with a continuous flow of water under them.
The Romans used scented oils mostly from Egypt , among other alternatives. Christianity places an emphasis on hygiene. The popes situated baths within church basilicas and monasteries starting in the early Middle Ages.
Contrary to popular belief, [78] and although some of the Early Christian leaders, such as Boniface I, [79] [ better source needed ] condemned bathing as unspiritual, [80] bathing and sanitation were not lost in Europe with the collapse of the Roman Empire. Northern Europeans were not in the habit of bathing: in the ninth century, Notker the Stammerer , a Frankish monk of St.
Gall, related a disapproving anecdote that attributed ill results of personal hygiene to an Italian fashion:. There was a certain deacon who followed the habits of the Italians in that he was perpetually trying to resist nature. He used to take baths, he had his head very closely shaved, he polished his skin, he cleaned his nail, he had his hair cut as short as if it were turned on a lathe, and he wore linen underclothes and a snow-white shirt.
Secular medieval texts refer to the washing of hands before and after meals, but Sone de Nansay, a hero of a 13th-century romance, discovers to his chagrin that the Norwegians do not wash up after eating.
Bathing fell out of fashion in Northern Europe long before the Renaissance , when the communal public baths of German cities were a wonder to Italian visitors. Bathing was replaced by the heavy use of sweat-bathing and perfume , as it was thought in Europe that water could carry disease into the body through the skin.
Bathing encouraged an erotic atmosphere that was played upon by the writers of romances intended for the upper class; [85] in the tale of Melusine the bath was a crucial element of the plot. Bathing was said to be a prelude to sin, and in the penitential of Burchard of Worms we find a full catalogue of the sins that ensued when men and women bathed together.
Until the late 19th century, only the elite in Western cities typically possessed indoor facilities for relieving bodily functions. The poorer majority used communal facilities built above cesspools in backyards and courtyards. This changed after Dr. John Snow discovered that cholera was transmitted by the fecal contamination of water.
Though it took decades for his findings to gain wide acceptance, governments and sanitary reformers were eventually convinced of the health benefits of using sewers to keep human waste from contaminating the water.
This encouraged the widespread adoption of both the flush toilet and the moral imperative that bathrooms should be indoors and as private as possible.
Modern sanitation was not widely adopted until the 19th and 20th centuries. According to medieval historian Lynn Thorndike, people in Medieval Europe probably bathed more than people did in the 19th century. The importance of hand washing for human health — particularly for people in vulnerable circumstances like mothers who had just given birth or wounded soldiers in hospitals — was first recognized in the mid 19th century by two pioneers of hand hygiene: the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis who worked in Vienna, Austria, and Florence Nightingale , the English "founder of modern nursing".
Islam stresses the importance of cleanliness and personal hygiene. Taharah ritual purity involves performing wudu ablution for the five daily salah prayers , as well as regularly performing ghusl bathing , which led to bathhouses being built across the Islamic world.
In the Abbasid Caliphate 8th—13th centuries , its capital city of Baghdad Iraq had 65, baths, along with a sewer system.
Bathing establishments in various cities were rated by Arabic writers in travel guides. Medieval Islamic cities such as Baghdad, Córdoba Islamic Spain , Fez Morocco , and Fustat Egypt also had sophisticated waste disposal and sewage systems with interconnected networks of sewers.
The city of Fustat also had multi-storey tenement buildings with up to six floors with flush toilets , which were connected to a water supply system, and flues on each floor carrying waste to underground channels.
A basic form of contagion theory dates back to the Persian medicine in the medieval, where it was proposed by Persian physician Ibn Sina also known as Avicenna in The Canon of Medicine , the most authoritative medical textbook of the Middle Ages.
He mentioned that people can transmit disease to others by breath, noted contagion with tuberculosis , and discussed the transmission of disease through water and dirt. In the Ayyubid Sultanate , they referred to them as najasat "impure substances".
The fiqh scholar Ibn al-Haj al-Abdari c. In the 9th century, Ziryab invented a type of deodorant. Ziryab is thought to have invented a type of toothpaste , which he popularized throughout Islamic Iberia. In West Africa , various ethnic groups such as the Yoruba have used black soap to treat skin diseases.
In Southern Africa , the Zulu people conducted methods of sanitation by using water stored in pottery at Ulundi. Hard toilet soap with a pleasant smell was invented in the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age when soap-making became an established industry.
Recipes for soap-making are described by Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi c. In the Middle East, soap was produced from the interaction of fatty oils and fats with alkali. In Syria , soap was produced using olive oil together with alkali and lime.
Soap was exported from Syria to other parts of the Muslim world and to Europe. By the 15th century, the manufacture of soap in Christendom had become virtually industrialized, with sources in Antwerp , Castile , Marseille , Naples , and Venice.
A major contribution of the Christian missionaries in Africa , [] China , [] Guatemala , [] India , [] Indonesia , [] Korea , [] and other places was better health care through hygiene and introducing and distributing soap, [] and "cleanliness and hygiene became an important marker of being identified as a Christian".
Many religions require or encourage ritual purification via bathing or immersing the hands in water. In Islam , washing oneself via wudu or ghusl is necessary for performing prayer. Islamic tradition also lists a variety of rules concerning proper hygiene after using the bathroom.
The Baháʼí Faith mandates the washing of the hands and face prior to the obligatory Baháʼí prayers. Orthodox Judaism requires a mikveh bath following menstruation and childbirth, while washing the hands is performed upon waking up and before eating bread.
Water plays a role in Christian rituals as well, [] and in certain denominations of Christianity such as the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church which prescribes several kinds of hand washing for example after leaving the latrine, lavatory, or bathhouse, or before prayer, or after eating a meal, or ritual handwashing.
First attested in English in , the word hygiene comes from the French hygiène , the latinisation of the Greek ὑγιεινή τέχνη hygieinē technē , meaning " art of health", from ὑγιεινός hygieinos , "good for the health, healthy", [] in turn from ὑγιής hygiēs , "healthful, sound, salutary, wholesome".
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Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikivoyage. Practices performed to preserve health. For specific kinds of hygienist, see Industrial hygienist and Dental hygienist.
For the social movement, see Social hygiene. For the community in the United States, see Hygiene, Colorado. This article may require copy editing for This text needs further citations.
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Main article: Oral hygiene. Main article: Sleep hygiene. Main article: Hygiene hypothesis. Main article: Food safety.
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