More people than ever realizethe importance of keeping their home hygienic. Ensuring that your home is a safe, clean place to live will help keep all manner of diseases at bay and help your family out a lot when it is common cold season. It’s especially important to keep a hygienic home when you have older or younger family members living with you.
Know What’s High-Touch
Around the home, there will be several high-touch areas. Every home is different but think of places that every family member regularly touches. These places could be door handles, tables, handrails, taps, and more. If you’re struggling to list everything, read a list of them online or if you want to educate your family about high touch surfaces, try putting some easily washable dye on your hands and going about your day. You will soon see the areas that you touch the most.
Disinfecting and Cleaning
Once you’ve found high-touch surfaces, you should clean them with soap or a disinfectant solution (most commonly those with 70% alcohol or more). Do not use vinegar and other natural products as they will not be strong enough and could even breed stronger pathogens by the survival of the fittest.
There will be some places that you find impossible to clean properly. A common high-touch area is the keyboard of a computer, which is notoriously difficult to clean due to the electronics underneath. Recent developments have made easily-to-disinfect keyboards and mouses like Team Technologies’ ICP Medical Infection Prevention keyboard. Still,with your existing keyboard, you should turn the device off as you carefully disinfect it. You could also look at getting a wipeable cover.
It is important to keep disinfectant on a wet surface for a few minutes for it to work – do not just wipe it off immediately. This makes disinfectant wipes a little difficult to use, so opt for sprays when possible.
Clothes
Your clothes can harbor all sorts of pathogens – Levi’s famously recommended freezing jeans to kill the bacteria that develop in them. When you do laundry, don’t shake anything that’s dirty as that can propel viruses through the air, ready to be inhaled. You should also make sure your clothes are bone dry before you put them away, which helps to kill pathogens. Immediately after handling dirty clothes, you should wash your hands with soap, just in case. You might also want to consider going for the Japanesetradition of in-home shoe-wear: get your family to leave shoes at the door, possibly substituting them for slippers if need be. This will help to keep out dirt.
Food Prep It is always advised to thoroughly wash your hands before touching any food, which will helpreduce any nasty pathogens that can cause upset tummies. You should also thoroughly wash unpackaged produce under running water before using them. You should always make sure your food bin is kept clean, as not doing so could attract pests and become a hotspot for fungi!
