Soap. After the toilet. Before food.
Wash your hands with soap after using the toilet and before cooking or eating - about twenty seconds.
Water alone is a rumour of cleaning. Soap is the actual meeting.
Here's the science
- What happensWashing hands with soap at key moments
- HowSoap lifts faecal and respiratory germs off the skin, breaking the route from hands to mouth and food
- SoSubstantially fewer episodes of diarrhoea, which is a major cause of child illness in India
Strongest - many studies agreeGLOBALmeasured abroad - shown for the mechanism, not the Indian number
“Handwashing promotion reduced diarrhoea episodes by around 30% in reviewed settings.”
Pooled from many low- and middle-income settings including South Asia; a strong, repeatedly-replicated finding.
Source: Hand-washing promotion for preventing diarrhoea (Cochrane Review, 2021) - Cochrane(checked 2026-07-18)
And when we do it
A soapy twenty seconds is one of the cheapest, best-proven ways to stop a household illness before it starts.
You couldn't have known. Now you do.