At the risk of alienating myself from future physical contact with Ish readers, I don’t really care that much about the hand-washing issue. As the old joke goes, “At Yale, they teach us not to pee on our hands.”

I’m all for workers who have contact with the public being required by the health dept. to wash their hands, but that is because they should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us, not because they should be regulated to do what we should be doing. As a similar example, I don’t always wear head covering when I cook. Yes, folks, if you’ve been to our house for a meal and I cooked any part of it, I did so bareheaded. ly.

And urine is sterile anyway. (Yes, it's true. I had a doctor who told me that if I had an open wound in the wild, and had no clean water, it was best to pee on it. And a former PM of India used to drink a glass of his own pee every morning).

So why care ? Well, two reasons. One is that there are shit particles in the bathroom, and you don't want them on your hands. The other is that we should be washing our hands often in general. That prevents us from spreading germs to others when we shake hands, and it prevents us from moving unhygenic things to our mouths when we eat or absentmindedly touch our lips.

I think the point is -- if you're in the bathroom anyway -- do you wash your hands ?

I'm become pretty fastidious about washing my hands before I eat, a habit I picked up while travelling. It would also be good for people to wash their hands before they shake hands w/ somebody (or after), but we're unlikely to see that happen.