OK hockey player and erstwhile blogger about all things zoonotic, Scott Weese, published a pretty cool paper about handwashing at a petting zoo on Friday.

Petting zoos are popular attractions, but can also be associated with zoonotic disease outbreaks. Hand hygiene is critical to reducing disease risks; however, compliance can be poor. Video observation of petting zoo visitors was used to assess animal and environmental contact and hand hygiene compliance. Compliance was also compared over five hand hygiene intervention periods.

Despite the role of hand hygiene in preventing infectious disease, compliance remains low. Education and training are often cited as essential to developing and maintaining hand-hygiene compliance, but generally have not produced sustained improvements. Consequently, this literature review was conducted to identify alternative interventions for compelling change in hand-hygiene behavior.

NHS hospitals may have an annoying voice that chimes up to remind you to "clean your hands with the gel" whenever you walk past a cleansing station, but Finnish company Ekahau has come up with something ten steps further. 

The producers of Bravo's Top Chef have me pegged as their target audience. Tonight's episode featured the Sesame Street characters Telly, Cookie Monster, and Elmo (who were hilarious judges), and new ads for Target featuring former Top Chef cheftestants and Padma. It's an entertaining episode that left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

Almost half of doctors in south Wales fail to wash their hands properly. When health council member Alison Morgan claimed to have noticed staff not washing their hands and challenging doctors, they asked "why?" Mrs Morgan described the situation as abysmal.

An electronic monitoring system Baptist Princeton Medical Center set up last year increased hand-washing by more than 850 percent and reduced hospital-acquired infections by 22 percent in the area it was used, according to a study Baptist has produced on the project.