Cinco de Mayo is National Hand Hygiene Day: CDC Promotes Health and Cleanliness

It's likely that many people will celebrate Cinco de Mayo on Monday with a lot of Mexican food and tequila. But May 5 is also Hand Hygiene Day, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hope to promote cleanliness to avoid preventable illnesses.

Clean hands prevent infections in various settings: home, school, work, doctor's offices, and hospitals. It's important that everyone properly cleanses their hands to lessen the spread of illnesses. SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands is a day celebrated by the World Health Organization, CDC, and other partners to promote awareness on the subject.

Known as the "do it yourself" vaccine, hand washing requires five steps: wet, lather, scrub, rinse, dry. According to the CDC, every year more than two million people in the U.S. get infections that are resistant to antibiotics, resulting in at least 23,000 deaths. Clean hands dramatically reduce the spread of diarrheal and respiratory illnesses that are dangerous, yet easily preventable.

Although it's important to frequently wash your hands throughout the day, there are specific times when it is absolutely essential. The Mayo Clinic says it's most necessary to wash your hands before preparing or eating food, treating wounds, and inserting or removing contact lenses. Additionally, it's important to wash your hands after coming into contact with raw meat or poultry, using the bathroom, touching an animal, blowing your nose, coughing, sneezing, and handling garbage.

The germs that spread from such actions can transfer bacteria, viruses, and other microbes if your hands are not properly and immediately cleansed. The spread of antimicrobial agents could further cause a resistance to antibiotics, which the WHO reported earlier this week is a "global threat." As many as half of those treated with certain antibiotics were found to be resistant to them in the WHO's first global report on antibiotic resistance.

The CDC offers a hand hygiene interactive training course as well as a patient admission video for both healthcare workers and people admitted into the hospital. You can read more about Hand Hygiene Day on the CDC website.