SCRUB TIME: FIFTH-GRADERS LEARN DIRTY HANDS SPREAD GERMS

A black light reveals a less than perfect job of cleaning fingernails.

Diane Gregory, left, of the Cape Girardeau County Health Department gave Cobret Joe some lotion with pigment that cam be detected by black light as "pretend germs."

A fifth-grader walks up to the black light and sticks his hands under it. Ghostly purplish-white splotches are immediately visible.

His classmates' "Eeeewwws~!!" fill the classroom.

Diane Gregory, a health inspector with the Cape Girardeau County Health Department, has been watching that scenario all week as she carries the lesson of how important clean hands are to staying healthy.

Thursday morning, she spoke to fifth-graders at May Greene School in Cape Girardeau.

The health department is working in conjunction with the Missouri Restaurant Association to stress the importance of hand-washing.

Students wash their hands with a special lotion, and if they don't wash their hands well enough to remove all the lotion, it shows up under the black light.

Some times a lot of it shows up. Some times, just a little is visible around the fingernails.

David Burke made a face when he saw his hands light up under the black light.

"See how you've got a bunch up on your wrists, and on the backs of your hands?" Gregory asked him.

"I thought they was going to be clean," David said, adding he'll try harder to keep his hands well-scrubbed.

The area around Megan Hempstead's fingernails lit up.

"I scrubbed my hands forever," she told classmates.

Seeing her hands under the black light "was funny," she said.

Students clustered around the light to see just how clean their classmates were.

Then it was teacher's turn.

"My hands didn't have a spot on them," Janet Wigfall announced.

Then she told the truth.

"One side was just covered, and I wash my hands all day long, and they're still really germ-y," she said.

Dirty hands spread germs, Gregory told students.

"Hand-washing is the easiest thing you can do to keep yourself healthy, along with eating right and getting enough sleep," she said.

All kinds of diseases can be spread by dirty hands, including hepatitis, salmonella, common colds and the stomach and upper respiratory bugs that have emptied classrooms and offices around the county for the last few weeks.

Hands can become germ-covered by contact with surfaces like desks or sinks, with other people or items they handle and with food contaminated with diseases like hepatitis or salmonella.

"Have a lot of your classmates been absent for the last week or two?" she asked students, who replied, "Yeah."

"Well, hand-washing can prevent that," Gregory said.

It's important to use hot water, lots of soap and lots of scrubbing to get hands clean, she said.

Saying the ABCs is one way to make sure you're washing long enough, Gregory said.

"You don't have to say your ABCs, but you need to scrub for about 20 seconds," she said.

Singing "Happy Birthday" twice will also cover the allotted time, she told students.

Gregory does the same demonstration during the county's monthly Food School for food handlers.

The Food School enrollees generally don't do any better than the fifth-graders, Gregory said, but the demonstration brings home how important clean hands are, especially in the food industry.

She was quick to assure students that the glowing stuff on their hands wasn't actual germs.

"Those are pretend germs that you're seeing," she said. "We'd need a microscope to look at real germs."

But if the lotion's not coming off during routine hand-washing, odds are the germs aren't either, she said.

"What it showed you was that you need to work more on those areas where it didn't wash off," Gregory said. "Some of you need to wash better all over."