Would your kids pay to wash their hands?
Maybe not yours, but it appears some would. Last year some kids at the Western Washington Fair asked how many tickets it would cost to go through Germ City. “A lot of kids thought it was one of the rides,” said Doris Torkelson, Cooperative Extension family living faculty in Grays Harbor and Mason counties.
Germ City is a traveling exhibit created by Torkelson, Susie Craig, and other Cooperative Extension faculty in western Washington to promote hand washing, an often overlooked behavior important for food safety, personal health, and disease prevention. “Research studies show that adults and children frequently fail to wash their hands even though they know they should,” said Craig. Poor personal hygiene—specifically hand washing—is linked to almost 20 percent of reported outbreaks of foodborne illness.
Each child is given a drop of Glo-Germ and instructed to spread it on his or her hands. Glo-Germ is a non-toxic lotion that has a pigment that glows under black light. The kids look at their hands under a black light inside Germ City, a light-proof, handicap accessible, 11-foot tunnel. They wash their hands in soap and water and examine their hands again under the black light to see if any traces of the “pretend germs” remain.
About 32,000 kids went through the exhibit at the Western Washington Fair in 1999. “Both kids and adults in wheelchairs were thrilled to be able to participate because it was something they could do at the fair that was fun,” Torkelson said.
Did the exhibit change behavior?
“While fair attendance in 1999 was roughly equal to 1998, soap usage doubled,” said B. Susie Craig, WSU Cooperative Extension, Thurston County. Germ City can trace its beginnings to OysterFest, an annual community event held in Shelton. In 1995, Cooperative Extension faculty in Grays Harbor and Mason counties were given the opportunity to offer educational workshops to rotating groups of grade school children at the Mason County fairgrounds.
“In 20 minutes we couldn’t do a nutrition lesson,” Torkelson said. “We thought washing hands was really important and something we could teach in the time we were allotted.”
About 450 kids went through the exhibit the first year. Germ City has since been taken to other festivals, fairs, community events, and elementary classrooms, reaching an estimated 35,000 people in Grays Harbor, Mason, Thurston, Pierce and Lewis counties alone in 1999.
“It’s very much a hands-on experience,” Torkelson said. “You’re not giving kids a lecture. You are letting them see.” In follow-up studies with elementary school students, Craig found that nearly 70 percent of students said they were washing their hands more frequently and longer.
Germ City was invited to 14 fairs this year. Craig received $12,500 from Group Health Community Foundation to take it to even more locations around the state.
Germ City’s success has not gone unnoticed. This past spring its creators and a small number of collaborators who have helped make it a success received the Team Excellence Award at the annual awards banquet of the WSU’s College of Agriculture and Home Economics.
Honored at the banquet were Craig and Kathy Schrift, both from WSU Thurston County Cooperative Extension, and Torkelson, Alice Whittaker, and Debbie Adolphsen, all of WSU Grays Harbor County Cooperative Extension. Others honored were Karen Sell of the Olympia Lions Club, Elizabeth Raferty of the Tumwater School District, Diane Westbrook of the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, and Dan Sharp of the Puyallup Fair.
Craig has made national presentations on Germ City at the Priester Health and Safety Conference, the Society for Nutrition Education, and at a food safety pre-school education program at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
