Abhijeet P Sinha
India
Biography
Abstract
The two-leading cause of under-five mortality is diarrhoea and pneumonia accounts for more than 30%. The evidence suggests us that hand washing with soap is cost effective yet very impactful intervention. Hand hygiene promotion interventions has potential to interrupt the transmission of diarrhea-causing pathogens. The Handwashing with soap can reduce significantly the incidence of diarrhea and pneumonia (Luby, 2005). As far as evidences are telling us that handwash is most cost-effective intervention and can reduce morbidity due to diarrhea by 44%. India has high number more than 50% of children’s are malnourished & under-nutrition is quite high in children from 6-24 months. Nevertheless, not only mortality but morbidity due to diarrhea and repeated occurrence in children can lead to severe malnourishment. Even the children’s borne healthy with normal weight nutrition status falls once child reached 6-24 months. Diarrhea is mainly caused by eating infected foods or liquids and person-to-person contact (mainly hand to hand then hand to mouth). Hand washing with soap is one of the most cost effective intervention. Hand wash & hygiene at key occasions specially before eating food and after toilet is important but not easy to practice and this requires behavior change and need to be practiced daily to adopt in routine habit. Children at early age during habit formation or at preschool stage need to taught & also parents need to practice that at household level. Hand wash & hygiene requires sharper behavioral change approach in the community to adopt this behavior and practice it as a daily habit. Sepsis is other leading cause of children within a month they are born and clean cord care & hand hygiene can prevent sepsis in neonate. Under-nutrition is the other leading cause of child death is often masked by the reported disease. Data says that 45% of all under-five mortality (more than 3.1 million per year) are due to diarrhea and pneumonia. (Horton, 2013).