October 15, 2015, by Helen Whitehead

Today is the day to PROPERLY wash your hands!

Today (15th October) is Global Handwashing Day, “a global advocacy day dedicated to increasing awareness and understanding about the importance of handwashing with soap as an effective and affordable way to prevent diseases and save lives”. It’s particularly designed to foster creative initiatives to encourage people to wash their hands effectively.

At the University of Nottingham, Kim Hardie (right) at the Centre for Biomolecular Sciences has been researching secreted proteins in bacterial infection. But not only that, she has been directly addressing ways to decrease the spread of infectious disease. With Joel Segal (Engineering), Jacqueline Randle (formerly in Health Sciences), Brigitte Nerlich (Social Sciences) and Caroline Windrum (formerly in Education), she has been developing interactive ways of improving the hand hygiene of children using the Glo-yo, an interactive toy to encourage children to wash their hands.

One of the first activities in our upcoming MOOC Sustainability, Society and You asks about washing your hands. As one in a series of quick opinion polls, we ask: Which do you think is more sustainable? Drying your hands with hot air dryers or using paper towels?

Although it (and the other polls) aren’t relevant to everyone, they allow us to gather some information about participants’ current views and behaviours – just to get us thinking. Then we introduce concepts of sustainability and some example readings and when everyone’s had a chance to read and reflect we invite them to take the poll again, so we can see how the flow of opinion has changed.

Find out more: join us now, ready to start on 2^nd November, on the free online course Sustainability, Society and You on FutureLearn.

You can follow the Glo-Yo project on its new Twitter account @Glo_yoUoN and join the discussion for Sustainability, Society and You with the hashtag #flsustain

Handwashing image © Flickr: Arlington County (arlingtonva) Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 Licence

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