Hygiene

Hygiene is a broad term encompassing any practices or behavior that can contribute to understand and preserve good-health by stopping infection routes. In the case of WASH, it refers to any practice or behavior that stops fecal-oral transmission of pathogens. Hygiene interventions encompass general awareness and education programs on hygiene behavior, while other intervention measures focus on particular hygienic practices, such as child-care behavior, breast-feeding, cooking habits, washing habits, etc. While breast-feeding has proven to be highly effective to reduce the contamination risks of infants, other measures are more difficult to measure. Amongst hygiene interventions, the most widely promoted and studied hygiene measure refers to ‘hand washing’. Based on the F-diagram (see explanation under water), hygiene should primarily target first transmission of pathogens by washing hands after defecation.