You may or may not know that 89% of consumers in the world feel safe and assured when their home is clean. It is important not to take health for granted. The cleanliness of your living and work spaces and good hygiene habits are of crucial importance for your health and well-being.  A good, safe, and sustainable implementation does not have to be a chore either. Good habits are essential to our health.

A look at what we mean by cleaning and hygiene

Cleaning is simply the mechanical or chemical removal of dirt and impurities from an object, a surface, or the human body. Usually, cleaning with soap or detergent and then rinsing with water is sufficient to remove any visible dirt and allergens. Cleaning also reduces the number of microorganisms on hands, surfaces, and tissues.

Disinfection is the targeting of disinfection to prevent the spread of infection in situations where there is a high risk of harmful germs being transmitted (e.g. when someone is infected or susceptible to infection). These services or processes prevent the infection from spreading by deactivating or killing pathogens.

Hygiene: describes the activities that maintain or promote human health. The cleaning and – if necessary – disinfection of surfaces, hands, devices, surroundings, and objects of personal use contribute to hygiene to interrupt the chain of infection. Other hygiene measures include maintaining a certain distance from sick people.

Cleaning and hygiene at home – basic principles

We clean or should clean our homes because we like to live in comfortable surroundings. But when we clean our homes, it also helps maintain our health.

Regular cleaning makes our home look clean and smells good. This gives us a sense of well – being that helps maintain good health.

Regular cleaning reduces the amount of dirt and vermin, such as dust mites, lice, and the like, that can be detrimental to our health. For example, allergens in dust can trigger allergies such as asthma.

Regular cleaning to remove dust, dirt, and food residues has a preventive effect against mice, cockroaches, etc, in the property/apartment.

Regularly cleaning bed linen prevents bed bug problems. You may be aware of the alarming news reports of Paris, the French city ‘known for its style, cuisine, and amour, has a bed bug problem. Videos of the insects crawling over Metro seats, in hotels, and swarming busses and movie theatres swept the internet, and bed bug anxiety reached a new high’. According to a national study released in July 2023 an estimated 11 percent of French households were in infested by bedbugs between 2017 and 2022.

Closer at home as reported by the Mirror

‘A new interactive map has been created showing the rising tide of bed bugs, which have many of the households in the nation in a state of fear. The outbreak is believed to have started in France – and people returning from holidays and the Rugby World Cup are believed to have brought them back to the UK.

Now many are seeking help to tackle bed bugs – either using conventional pest control chemicals – or other remedies. Pest control firms in London say they have been ‘inundated’ with calls. The number of people in the UK using Google to search for information on bed bugs has rocketed nearly fourfold in the past month, the Mirror reported.

A Sussex seaside town standing 40 miles from the coast of France has been identified as the worst place affected by the insects. Residents of St Leonards-on-Sea generated a higher rate of Google searches for the term ‘bed bugs’ than any area in the country in the last 90 days – amid fears that an infestation in Paris could mean the blood-sucking insects are also taking hold here.

Google stats show that there have been around 80,000 searches in the UK for the term ‘bed bugs’ in the last 30 days, which is an increase of 287% compared to the previous month. Using figures posted by Google Trends, the Mirror has identified the areas of the country where residents are most concerned that they may have been infected.

Pest control firms have warned that the spread of the blood-sucking insects is “out of control”. Speaking earlier this month, Tony King, owner of Pied Piper Pest Control, said they had been found in offices and cars, as well as homes.

“We’ve been inundated with calls about bedbugs – we’ve been flat out for at least the last eight or nine months with them,” he said. Mr King said he believed the increase was down to international travel opening up following the pandemic.

He added that another problem was that “a lot of people have got bedbugs and are not reporting them”. David Cain, founder of Bed Bugs Limited, said there had been “exponential growth” in bedbug cases over the last 20 years and that they are now “out of control”.

“The problem is worse now than it’s been since probably the 1930s and 1940s”. He said the number of bedbug cases he dealt with had increased from around four to five a week in 2007 to 15 to 20 this year.

“They’re not just in people’s beds: they’re on public transport, in doctor’s surgeries, cinemas, restaurants – all over the place.” Mr Cain described reports of a bedbug infestation in Paris driving an increase in London as a “red herring” created by social media.

“People are still encountering bedbugs in virtually every major city in the world. They’re just not hashtagging them like in Paris.”

Bed bug hotspots of Britain – with Google search score

• Saint Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex – 100
• Havant, Hampshire – 96
• Halling, Kent – 92
• Lowton, Wigan – 90
• Whickham, Tyne and Wear – 86
• Kilbirnie, South Ayrshire – 85
• Debenham, Suffolk – 80
• Broxbourne, Herefordshire – 74
• Sheerness, Kent – 73
• Stewartby, Bedfordshire – 70

Dr Richard Naylor, director at the Bed Bug Foundation, said a search for alternative methods to control bedbugs was underway as “there’s a real problem with insecticide resistance”. However, he added that there was “very little evidence of them transmitting disease”.

“It’s been shown theoretically in some lab studies that there’s a few things that they can transmit, but it almost never happens. “The key thing with bedbugs is the mental health impacts which can be really severe. As people who get bedbugs tend to have a lot of shame about it.”

Dr Naylor, who completed a PhD in bedbug ecology at the University of Sheffield, added that this can lead to people becoming “very isolated and sleep deprived”. He said a good way of avoiding bedbugs is to keep “bags off the bed and away from the bed” when visiting hotels and hospitals.

St Leonards-on-Sea in East Sussex faces directly towards the Normandy coast and is also geographically among the closest towns in Britain to Paris, so it is perhaps understandable why it comes top of the list with people searching for bed bug on Google.

But Google also lists 148 other bed bug ‘hotspots’ with heightened levels of interest in the insects, and although roughly a third are in and around London and Kent, the others are spread right across the country. In the list is Havant in Hampshire, Halling in Kent, but also further north there is Lowton, near Wigan and Whickham in Tyne and Wear.

Kilbirnie, a small town in North Ayrshire, is ranked sixth in the list and the other areas ranked in the top ten ‘hotspots’ are Debenham, a village in Suffolk, Broxbourne in Herefordshire, Sheerness in Kent, and Stewartby, a village in Bedfordshire. After Kilbirnie, six other places in Scotland appear in the full list of bed bug hotspots including the Caithness town of Wick in the far north of the country. There is one hotspot in Northern Ireland and five in Wales.

Around London, Google detected the biggest search volumes for ‘bed bug’ information in Thornton Heath, Bexleyheath, Ilford, Waltham Abbey, Walton-on-Thames, Wembley, Edgware and Southall. Bed bug experts say there has been ‘exponential growth’ in the problem in recent years, even before fears of the infestation coming from Paris’.

Regular cleaning reduces the number of fungi that can grow in damp areas in the kitchen, bathroom, and toilet and cause respiratory problems.

Measures such as cleaning, disinfection, and heat treatment prevent the spread of harmful germs and thus protect against infectious diseases.

Cleaning needs to be carried out daily or weekly to bring potential hazards to the lowest possible level. However, cleaning to prevent infection is different.

Protection against harmful microbes through targeted hygiene

A clean home does not mean that it is free of potentially harmful microbes that keep getting into the environment, e.g. B. from the people and animals living there and the food that is prepared. These microbes are invisible, and you cannot clean your home to free them from microbes.

 

The effective way to protect your home from harmful microbes is to use proper hygiene measures in those situations where they are most likely to spread. We call this “targeted hygiene”.