Hyderabad|India|October'2008: Global Handwash Day, yet another day is being added to the huge list of days to be observed, celebrated all over the globe. The first ever Global Hand Wash Day will be celebrated in India on October 15. 

Every day India loses around1,000 children to diarrhoea in India. This means 41 children die every 60 minutes due to this highly preventable disease. Globally, every year, more than 3.5 million children do not live to celebrate their fifth birthday because of diarrhoea and pneumonia. According to WHO, diarrhoea alone kills almost 2 million children every year, making it the second leading killer of children world wide. And one out of every five of these children who die of diarrhoea is an Indian!  

A simple hygiene habit – washing hands with soap – could halve this figure. Yet, despite its lifesaving potential, hand washing with soap is seldom practiced and not always easy to promote. According to London Schoo of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Washing hands with soap and water reduces diarrhoeal incidences by 47%. 

The inaugural Global Hand Washing Day (GHWD) is slated to open on Wednesday, October 15, 2008 and attempts at putting this often overlooked hygiene challenge at the forefront of the international agenda.  

An initiative of a coalition between public and private partners who together form the Public-Private Partnership for Hand Washing (PPPHW) (www.globalhandwashing.org) GHWD will be the centre piece of a week of activities that will mobilise millions of people in more than 20 countries across five continents to wash their hands with soap. Millions of children in 20 countries across 5 continents will join hands to encourage hand washing with soap on the first-ever Global Handwashing Day (15 October 08).  

In India this will be marked by hand wash being performed across the country with the local partners Lifebuoy, FXB suraksha, Plan india and Wateraid. 

Hand washing plays an important part in the efforts to reach the Millennium Development Goals relating to health improvements, education and the reduction of poverty and child mortality, as well as access to and effective use of water supply and sanitation services. These were agreed to by UN member countries at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in September 2002. The practice of hand washing with soap tops the international hygiene agenda, and Global Handwashing Day spotlights this important issue in the year that the UN General Assembly has designated 2008 as the International Year of Sanitation (IYS).  

PPPHW has thus chosen 2008 to launch the international Global Hand Washing Day initiative to promote hand washing with soap, and in turn to promote improved hygiene practices and draw attention to the world’s enormous sanitation challenge. Stepping up investment in hand washing will be crucial to meet the child health targets set by the UN. This will be implemented through large-scale hand washing interventions by combining the expertise and resources of the soap industry, with the facilities and resources of the government.  

From Egypt to India, China to Peru, Ethiopia to Indonesia, playgrounds and classrooms, local communities and big cities will be buzzing on Global Hand Washing Day (15 October 2008) with high profile activities to accelerate hand washing behaviour change on a scale never seen before. Global Hand Washing Day will echo and reinforce its call for improved hygiene practices.  

Although people around the world wash their hands with water, very few wash their hands with soap at critical moments (for example, after using the toilet, while cleaning a child, and before handling food). Diarrhoea is both preventable and treatable, yet families in developing countries continue to pay the price of this disease in lost lives, missed school days, reduced resistance to infections, impaired growth, malnutrition and poverty.  

When coupled with educational initiatives, hand washing with soap is one of the world’s most cost-effective preventive health interventions and has been proven to reduce the risk of not only diarrhoea and pneumonia, which together are responsible for the majority of child deaths, but also some of its more severe manifestations, such as cholera and dysentery, by 48-59 percent. The Global Hand Washing Day aims to bring about a change by raising awareness with children, school teachers and parents who will join celebrities, government officials, NGO ambassadors and members of the private sector to call for proper hygiene practices across the world and raise awareness that hand washing with soap is a powerful public health intervention.