The potential impact of intensified community hand hygiene interventions on respiratory tract infections: a modelling study
Issued Date
2022-01-01
Resource Type
ISSN
13645021
eISSN
14712946
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85130544993
Journal Title
Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
Volume
478
Issue
2261
Rights Holder(s)
SCOPUS
Bibliographic Citation
Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences Vol.478 No.2261 (2022)
Suggested Citation
Pham T.M., Yin M., Cooper B.S. The potential impact of intensified community hand hygiene interventions on respiratory tract infections: a modelling study. Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences Vol.478 No.2261 (2022). doi:10.1098/rspa.2021.0746 Retrieved from: https://repository.li.mahidol.ac.th/handle/20.500.14594/84642
Title
The potential impact of intensified community hand hygiene interventions on respiratory tract infections: a modelling study
Author(s)
Other Contributor(s)
Abstract
Hand hygiene is among the most fundamental and widely used behavioural measures to reduce the person-to-person spread of human pathogens and its effectiveness as a community intervention is supported by evidence from randomized trials. However, a theoretical understanding of the relationship between hand hygiene frequency and change in risk of infection is lacking. Using a simple model-based framework for understanding the determinants of hand hygiene effectiveness in preventing viral respiratory tract infections, we show that a crucial, but overlooked, determinant of the relationship between hand hygiene frequency and risk of infection via indirect transmission is persistence of viable virus on hands. If persistence is short, as has been reported for influenza, hand-washing needs to be performed very frequently or immediately after hand contamination to substantially reduce the probability of infection. When viable virus survival is longer (e.g. in the presence of mucus or for some enveloped viruses) less frequent hand washing can substantially reduce the infection probability. Immediate hand washing after contamination is consistently more effective than at fixed-time intervals. Our study highlights that recommendations on hand hygiene should be tailored to persistence of viable virus on hands and thatmore detailed empirical investigations are needed to help optimize this key intervention.