How does not washing your hands make you a healthier person?

 

 Avoid washing hands will make you sick and unhealthy.  There seems to be a popular view recently that poor hygiene will make you healthier in the long-term because it exposes you to more bacteria and strengthens your immune system.  This view is wrong, although it can be traced back to the principle of truth.  The life-saving application principle of vaccines is that if you expose your immune system to a certain type of bacteria, it will learn to recognize and build immunity against this type of bacteria, which can last for several years. 

 Therefore, a new popular view has emerged that poor hygiene is like giving yourself a mini vaccine, which can strengthen your immune system and make you healthier in the long run. This inference from vaccines to poor hygiene is wrong for the following reasons: 

1.  Certain vaccines can only make you immune to certain diseases, but usually do not strengthen your entire immune system.  Vaccinating a child against measles will not protect him from polio.  This is why children must be vaccinated with many different vaccines, which is to protect him from all major infectious diseases.  Getting sick from unwashed bacteria will only increase your immunity to specific bacteria. However, there are thousands (perhaps millions) of different types of infectious bacteria.  The common cold alone can be caused by more than 200 different viruses.  To be immune to the common cold, you will have to be infected with each of the different strains 200 times.  Even if you do, you will still not be protected for the reasons mentioned below.  

2. Bacteria evolution.  When your body is immune to a certain type of bacteria, it will only develop immunity to the bacteria that infect you.  The new version of the same bacterium may have evolved into a sufficiently different organism that your immune system cannot recognize it.  This is why the flu vaccine must be reformulated every year.

 3.  Vaccines are made up of modified bacteria that can stimulate the required immune enhancement without causing you disease.  There are no bacteria on unwashed hands.  In order to make a vaccine, scientists kill or kill bacteria, inactivate their toxicity, make them weaker or replicate non-toxic.  After the modified bacteria are injected into the patient, they can understand and remember their molecular shape by producing antigen-specific antibodies. But because the bacteria have been rendered non-toxic, patients can get the benefits of immunity without actually getting sick.  On the contrary, bacteria on unwashed hands will be fully active and can cause disease.  You may develop immunity to specific hand-borne pathogens, but you may also die or suffer long-term damage in the process.

 Hand washing has always been one of the greatest advancements in medicine.  Before the development of the concept of bacteria, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis made an interesting discovery.  As described in the biography written by Sir William Japp Sinclair, Dr. Semmelweis worked at the Vienna General Hospital in the 1840s when he discovered two different births in the hospital There are differences in mortality rates between clinics. In the first clinic, an average of about 10% of childbirth mothers died of childhood fever, while in the second clinic, less than 4% of mothers died of childhood fever.  

Year after year, the death rate at the first clinic has been high.  The news spread, and the struggling mothers begged to be sent to the second clinic instead of the first clinic.  Through examination, Dr. Semmelweis found that the only difference between the two clinics was that the doctors in the first clinic also performed autopsy, while most of the doctors in the second clinic did not. He believes that this deadly disease was transferred from the body to the delivery mother who was in the hands of the doctor.  After the implementation of the strict chlorine hand washing policy in mid 1847, the death rate from fever in the first clinic dropped from 18% in April to 1% in July.  In the second year, the death rate dropped to zero.  Unfortunately, Dr. Semmelweis' discovery was ignored and mocked by the medical institutions of his time. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated: “Keeping hands clean by improving hand hygiene is one of the most important steps we can take to avoid illness and spread germs to others.  Washing hands without soap and clean tap water can spread many diseases and conditions.  To stay healthy, you should wash your hands after preparing food, eating, taking care of the ineffective, going to the toilet, treating wounds, changing diapers, coughing or sneezing, and touching garbage.