FeaturesFeatureCan the coronavirus bridge a secret gender divide?

Can the coronavirus bridge a secret gender divide?

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Guys — as in the male gender — have a dirty little secret: many of us do not wash our hands after we use the restroom.

I know this from years of observation in public and office restrooms all over the Philippines and even overseas.

Even those who use not the urinals but the toilets inside the stalls, which suggest an even greater necessity to use soap and water, often quickly exit the restroom without hand-washing, as if they were afraid others will recognize them and learn that they performed what is a perfectly normal, but perhaps also socially shameful, biological function.

You may be horrified to know that restaurant workers, including food servers, have been spotted exiting their establishment’s comfort rooms without so much as wetting their hands.

I am, of course, in no position to comment on what goes on in women’s restrooms, but my female friends and family members all swear that most users of female restrooms are more devoted hand washers.

These females typically share that expert opinion after a show of utter disgust at my revelation of this hidden male depravity.

And some colleagues, of course, find my longtime interest in this esoteric field of hygiene a laughing matter.

I’ve been a bit skeptical about this gender divide, and wonder if women were really, behind those closed doors, just as disgusting as men. (I want to assure my friends, however, that this curiosity has never driven me to try to validate this notion through some form of observation.)

Hand washing has never just been about good manners. According to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention in the US, “feces (poop) from people or animals is an important source of germs like Salmonella, E. coli O157, and norovirus that cause diarrhea, and it can spread some respiratory infections like adenovirus and hand-foot-mouth disease… A single gram of human feces–which is about the weight of a paper clip–can contain one trillion germs.”

The CDC continues: “When these germs get onto hands and are not washed off, they can be passed from person to person and make people sick.”

Now, as the global coronavirus crisis has made hand washing a key to slowing its terrifying spread, I finally decided to see if there was more robust evidence behind the assumptions of gender differences in hand hygiene.

A cursory online search of Philippine research articles did not yield anything on gender, but it did produce something much more shocking: various articles concluded that hand hygiene inside Philippine hospitals and among Filipino health workers was far from satisfactory.

In a 2017 article in the Philippine Journal of Internal Medicine, two doctors wrote that hand hygiene compliance in one tertiary hospital was a measly 11 percent, with compliance among doctors even less. Nurses were more likely to wash than doctors at this particular hospital. The authors felt the need to do research on this simple practice because infections acquired inside hospitals have always been a major health care problem, and hand washing was “the primary measure that prevents health care-associated infections.”

Another study asserted that “hand hygiene, the most efficient and cost-effective means of controlling hospital infection, is the most ignored intervention.” None of these studies mention any gender divide among medical workers.

Doing a more general online search of international articles produced a eureka moment. A 2009 study published in the American Journal of Public Health showed that only 31 percent of men and 65 percent of women washed their hands after using a public restroom.

If it’s any consolation, Filipino men can rest assured that their ethnicity or nationality probably has little to do with this fatal flaw. It may simply be a guy thing.

Today, as the age of CoViD-19 dawns, what used to be a dispensable act has become a matter of life and death.

Failure to wash your hands could result in infection, which would make you an unsuspecting carrier who takes this deadly virus into your home and makes your aging family members vulnerable to a quick demise.

The dread has been enough to make macho guys religious hand washers and meticulous alcohol wipers in and out of restrooms.

If there’s a bright side to this crisis, it’s this: for a people who seem culturally resistant to health and safety-seeking behavior (really, this is one of the very few countries in the world where motorists generally do not stop for pedestrians inside pedestrian lanes), the average Filipino is now thinking a lot about how to protect themselves and their families from disease.

National and local governments, private organizations, and schools are taking extraordinary steps to keep healthy populations well, by introducing new measures (foot baths! temperature guns!), and maintaining old (voilí ) full soap dispensers for a change!

So this may also be the dawn of a new age of health-seeking habits that will prevent not only CoViD-19 infections and deaths but a host of other scourges that have long afflicted Filipinos.

It’s unforgiveable that nearly 80 years after tuberculosis killed a Philippine President (Manuel L. Quezon), it is still killing 70 of his countrymen every day, despite being a curable disease.

Dengue, malaria, and measles are all preventable, and still kill scores every year. Maybe because none of these ever caused the kind of panic that is sweeping many places? One can only hope that CoViD-19 is stopped before it becomes as normal an occurrence as those other diseases.

But back to the gender divide. A February 2020 article in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine shows that of more than 1,000 CoViD-19 patients reported in China through January 2020, the majority, or 58 percent, was male.

Could this gender difference be linked to hand hygiene? The research doesn’t say. But if it is, I want no part of it. I’m washing my hands and wiping down this keyboard. (Howie G. Severino)

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This article was published as a Note in the Facebook account of the author. It was also published in GMA News Online.

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