Dettol reaches over 16 million learners with Healthy Hands, Healthy Mind

That’s over 16 million learners educated about the importance of good personal hygiene.

In an effort to minimise the number of children who die every day from preventable illnesses like diarrhoea, Dettol started the energetic industrial theatre road show, distributed a School Hygiene Workbook and appeared in just under 26 000 schools across the country since 2006. The show teaches five to 10-year-olds how hand washing and good personal hygiene can massively reduce the incidence of infectious disease and illness, while the workbook reinforces the message of the importance of hygiene and keeping healthy.

Dettol’s hygiene education initiative is a fun and engaging tool for children, and also provides teachers with resources to support them in reinforcing good hygiene habits to reward learners in keeping their hands clean, along with their parents.

When one considers that diarrhoeal diseases is the second leading cause of death in children under five-years-old - which is a preventable disease - small hygiene measures like proper hand washing can have a huge impact on a child’s health, and possibly even save their life.

While catching some bugs is inevitable for children there are still ways to reduce the chance that they will get sick.

All learners will share food and drinks, personal space and stationary with no thought to hand washing, and it’s sometimes not the type of food that learners are eating that causes diarrhoea but rather the dirty hands used to eat the food. Impacting this is the fact that learners spend hours every day together in close proximity at school, whether in the classroom or on the playground. It only takes one child who overlooks good hygiene habits to potentially spread infections to many.

Children should be encouraged to wash their hands with soap and water at specific times:

- Before eating;
- After going to the toilet;
- After playing with a pet or animal;
- After coughing, sneezing or blowing their nose;
- After touching something dirty (for example, chewed pencils and used tissues);
- Whenever the hands physically look dirty; and
- When a child starts school, nursery or day care for the first time, take a look around together and show the child where they can wash their hands so they feel familiar with the space.

For more information on Dettol, visit www.dettol.co.za.