Handshakes are germ bombs – embrace the fist bump!
There’s a movement afoot to end handshaking. I am not the first person to bring to your attention that hands, doorknobs, surfaces – they are all laden with germs!
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 80% — 80%! — of all infections are transmitted by hands.
That very well might explain why you are sick —- or recovering from being sick. Same goes for your co-workers. Your kids. Your “significant other”. And so on.
Experts say frequent that hand washing goes a long way toward curbing the spread of “influenza-attributable illness” in adults, which costs the nation more than $83.3 billion each year in lost productivity and medical bills.
But the reality is that some of us — how to put this delicately — are a little cleaner than others.
One solution, says Atlantic senior editor James Hamblin, is to stop shaking hands and embrace the fist bump as a more hygienic greeting. We’ll let Hamblin, a medical school graduate turned journalist, explain it in technical terms:
“Handshaking is gross,” he told the Los Angeles Times. (If you want to know how gross, keep reading.)
He is now a proponent of the fist bump as a way to greet others, an idea he began espousing in print — a.k.a. the Fist Bump Manifesto — after reading about the germ-curbing tactic in a medical journal.
Hamblin is not alone. Psychology Today also has called for ending this cherished cultural tradition, and there’s a website dedicated to it: Stop Handshaking. And if you take a spin through our photo gallery above, you’ll find some well-known folks who prefer the fist bump over a handshake.
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