Hier nog een artikel dat het belang van zeepgebruik aanwijst en hoe groot het potentieel is voor Airspray producten.
Het komt uit The Economist van July 6th 2002.
About Hand-washing:
How to save 1 milion children in a year?
Just add soap and water!
The second-biggest killer of children in the world is neither malaria, nor tuberculosis, nor AIDS. It is the runs. Diarrhuea kills the equivalent of a jumbo-jet full of children every four hours. Development specialists have known this for years and struggled to prevent it by diverse means: easier access to water for washing, better health education, oral rehydratiopn therapy and so on. Now it seems that the best solution may also be the simplest: persuading people to wash their hands with soap.
Obvious, really. But not in developing countries, where most households have soap of some sort but only 15-20% routinely use to wash there hands after going to the toilet, cleaning a dirty baby or undertaking other tasks that spread potentially lethal bugs. Even in rich coutries, people do not wash there hands with soap as often as they should: fewer then half of British mothers will do so after changing a nappy, and only one person in three remembers after a trip to the loo.
Yet a literaure review carried out by Valeri Curtis and her colleagues at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (and not yet published) finds that appropiate hand-washing can cut diaroeal diseasses by 43%. It may have an equally big impact on respiratory-tract infections, the biggest child-killer of all. A huge study caried out for the American army found that sniffels and coughs fell by 45% when troops washed their hands five times a day.
But how to persuade people to scrub? Two years ago, at a World Bank forum on hygiene and health, Dr. Curtis suggested a global partnership between soap makers and sanitation experts. Development officials had always tended to emphasise the role of the public sector in improving public health. But it is the private sector that builts most of the worlds toilets and sells it soap. A previous public-private partnership, involving three big soap compagnies,
had worked well in Central America. Dr. Curtis began with a trial in two places: Ghana, in West-Africa, and Kerela, a reletively developed state in southern India.
Bringing together all those concerned with encouraging hand-washing turned out to be a revelation. The private-sector soap compagnies and government officials and healthworkers found it hard to understand each other at first. The ponderous bureaucracy of officialdom dismayed the soap compagnies. The bureaucrats misjuged the difficulty of getting rival compagnies to work together.
Now the World Bank is backing a programme in Ghana to promote hand-washing. The Indian and Kerela governments are raising $8m-10m for a similar three year programme in Kerela. The soap compagnies think sales could grow by 40% in each market.
The health experts are bowled over by the marketing prowess that the compagnies are bringing to the project. Together they have, forinstance, understood that Ghanaians prefer liqiud to solid soap for hand-washing and are more likely to wash their hands before eating if the soap does not smell too strong (since Ghanaians often eat with their hands). They have also calculated that an ideal time to change a mother's habits is when a new baby arives (this
because she is then more receptive to new ideas and also in more frequent contact with health workers). They have learnt when and how often to show advertisements to have maximum impact. And they have realised that families want to buy soap in very small quantities- perhaps like a sweet wrapped in paper- because some dislike sharing toilet soap and other cannot afford to buy big bars.
Once the programme has been rolled out in the first two places it will be extended to China, Nepal, Peru, parts of Central-Asia and Senegal.
According to Dr. Curtis, soap is a sort of do it yourself vaccine. And profitable and affordable too.