Impacts of Hygiene

Hygiene is one of the most important things in our life. We need hygiene to save our life and prevent unwanted events that may lead us to death. The definition itself is a set of practices performed for the preservation of health (Wikipedia). Sometimes, we tend to forget hygiene. In some countries, they are struggling on maintaining hygiene which leads to higher death rate in their countries. On the other hand, some other countries really priorities hygiene, especially in More Economically Developed Countries.

 



Sometimes we like to underestimate the use of hygiene, but unexpectedly hygiene has an important role in our life. Unwanted diseases such as HIV/AIDS, dengue fever, malaria, diarrhoea, and many more might come due to lack of hygiene. As I said before in some countries (mostly Less Economically Developed Countries), hygiene is often forgotten. So for now, let’s talk about the example of the disease that might spread if we underestimate hygiene, HIV/AIDS. What is HIV?

HIV is a Human Immunodeficiency Virus. This virus attacks the human’s body system. This virus can spread through transfusion of contaminated blood, unprotected sex and also breast feeding. There are 10 million people and 3 million children in Africa that are HIV positive. Also, two-thirds of the world’s HIV people live in Africa.

To add on, you can get HIV from contact with infected blood, semen, or vaginal fluids. Most people get the virus by having unprotected sex with someone who has HIV. Another common way of getting it is by sharing drug needles with someone who is infected with HIV as it is told before.

As I said before, HIV/AIDS is one of the diseases that we might get if we ignore hygiene. Then how to prevent it?

-          Prevent unprotected sex

-          Make sure that the needle that is used is not contaminated/clean (if we are getting injections)

-          Eat healthy food (make sure it is clean as well)

Another example of the disease is dengue fever. This often happens to us, it started by getting bitten by a mosquito and ended up in the hospital. This is also caused by lack of hygiene like for example, earlier this month is raining season which means puddles are everywhere. These puddles are fine, IF ONLY the place is not dirty or crowded with trashes. The problem is that usually, these puddles are often dirty due to overcrowded trashes that are not thrown in the right place.  Like for example, on the riverbanks there are so many trashes and when it rains, the water would get trapped in the gaps between the trashes. That is the place where mosquitos lay eggs the most. If we are not active on this, more and more people will get this disease which also might increase the chance of death.

So what should we do? Go back to the topic, hygiene. It’s all about hygiene. We can prevent it from happening by throwing trashes in the right places, making sure that our house is always clean and not full of things that are not used anymore which provides mosquito breeding and so on. So, what are we waiting for, start loving hygiene and start acting!

 

References:

- https://kaiserfamilyfoundation.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/top-10-countries-adult-hiv-prevalence-percent-2014-globalhealth.png

- https://www.aids.gov/hiv-aids-basics/hiv-aids-101/what-is-hiv-aids/

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS

-  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene