Social Factors that Affect the Hand Hygiene of Elementary and Highschool Students in İstanbul – Turkey

Summary Persons are the primary performers for all food security systems and public health procedures, but humans do not have a standard configuration. The personal variables like age, gender, economic positions, psychological conditions, educations given by the family, life style and environment are the factors that determine main personal differences of humans. This situation can cause implementation differences for standard procedures as food security performances and educations related with food hygiene. Especially individual hygiene procedures must be tought to individulas when they are in childhood and early adult period very effectively. In this study we aim to determine how the social factors (economic position, mother/father occupation, number of siblings/household, etc.) effect hand hygiene according to the chosen microbiological parameters statistically who are registered in elementary and highschool programs of different schools in Istanbul. For this purpose 20 schools were visited for 3 months (visits were monthly). From each school 50 students (25 male and 25 female students) were sampled. The samples were anaylzed for the chosen microbiological parameters the correlations were determined among the microbiological parameters and the social variables of the students. According to the results we got, it was determined that the social variables were very effective on the students hygiene habits and microbiological load of the hands.