Safe drinking-water, sanitation and hygiene are crucial to human health and well-being. Safe WASH is not only a prerequisite to health, but contributes to livelihoods, school attendance and dignity and helps to create resilient communities living in healthy environments.
Personal hygiene Hygiene is multi-faceted and comprises many behaviours, including hand- and face washing, menstrual hygiene and food hygiene. Hand washing with soap at crucial events such as after visiting the toilet, defecating or before preparing food was estimated to be a poorly practised behaviour globally.
A new commentaryis now available online for you to share with colleagues - World Hand Hygiene Day 2026 - Action Saves Lives Integrating hand hygiene into action plans to meet a global target. This article is free to access until the end May 2026. Share your activities and experiences in the IPC global community of practice.
Most HAIs are preventable through hand hygiene performed at the right times. The WHO Guidelines on hand hygiene in health care outline hand hygiene recommendations and are complemented by the WHO Multimodal hand hygiene improvement strategy, the Guide to implementation, and an implementation toolkit, which contains many ready-to-use practical ...
Hand hygiene is therefore the most important measure to avoid the transmission of harmful germs and prevent health care-associated infections. This brochure explains how and when to practice hand hygiene.
This report summarizes the World Health Organization’s (WHO) global work on water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) during 2024
Compilation of the facts, evidence, numbers, examples, and stats to be used to raise awareness about hand hygiene in messages and presentations.
For World Hand Hygiene Day 2026, WHO calls on all those providing and supporting health care to refresh their action on hand hygiene and infection prevention and control (IPC), to ensure patient and health worker safety.A substantial proportion of avoidable infections acquired during health care delivery could be prevented if hand hygiene and IPC action were taken at the correct times. Such ...