Wednesday is "Global Handwashing Day."

October 15th is "Global Handwashing Day." As you were.

If you're interested in doing a little reading on the matter as it relates to South Korea, there are a number of abstracts which mention hand washing, usually in hospital settings, available from a KoreaMed search. In the first draft of this post I put up a few excerpts, although I don't want to get a reputation. Find the alarming ones yourselves. For what is proclaimed the first comprehensive study of handwashing in Korea, click here for the .pdf file. It's in Korean, though the abstract and the figures are in English. The "results," from the abstract:

Although 94% of the survey respondents claimed to mostly or always wash their hands after using public restrooms, only 63.4% of the observed participants did wash their hands after using public restrooms. Significant factors related to increased adherence to hand washing were female gender, approximate ages of 20 to 39 years by their appearance, and the presence of other people from the observation. About 79% of the survey respondents always washed their hands after using bathrooms at home, 73% washed their hands before handling food, and 67% washed their hands upon returning to their home. However, 93.2% and 86.3% of the survey respondents did not wash their hands after coughing or sneezing and after handling money, respectively. Although most of the survey respondents (77.6%) were aware that hand washing is helpful in preventing communicable diseases, 39.6% of the survey respondents did not do so because they were ‘not accustomed’ to washing their hands and 30.2% thought that washing their hands is ‘annoying’.

For the hypersensitive expats who will no doubt take offense to writing something unpleasant about Korea on a Korea-related blog, I have to point out that the statistics here aren't a whole lot worse than back home, and Google will be your friend for those numbers. I hope you're satisfied, then, and will let me wallow in quote-unquote negativity while you return to bitching about pushy grandmothers and the lack of obscure Western foodstuffs in your mid-sized town. Korea is very exotic, you're right, and boy is that kimchi smelly, so go ahead and write about that some more.

You know what I don't understand about Korea? At every store large and small you can buy liquid soap dispensers, but in 39 months I've never seen jugs of liquid soap for sale so I can fill the dispensers. Where can I find some?

More information about the benefits of handwashing are available here, in a .pdf file, from the official site. Might be worth bringing up, since pink eye is going around the schools and since, um, nobody washes their hands after using the bathroom. If you poke around you can find multilingual posters like this one (.pdf) that remind people to wash their hands before handling food. But since my coworkers get upset when I fix mistakes on the English exam, you can bet they'd beat me like a deaf kid if I brought up hand washing in any but the most delicate manner.