國家地理:新冠病毒和洗手文化(1)

"You have come from Mumbai to teach us about handwashing?"

“你專程從孟買來教我們洗手？”

The villagers couldn't stop laughing at Yusuf Kabir. He works at UNICEF's Mumbai office, in a division with an apt acronym -- WASH, for water, sanitation, and hygiene -- and he was on a tour of the Latur district, some 250 miles east of Mumbai, to advocate hand hygiene as a safeguard of health. In Latur, as elsewhere in the state of Maharashtra, Kabir was learning that handwashing just wasn't a priority for many villagers. "They couldn't see any tangible impact," he recalls.

村民止不住地嘲笑著尤蘇夫·卡比爾。他在聯(lián)合國兒童基金會位于孟買的辦公室工作。他部門的名稱縮寫恰好是WASH，負(fù)責(zé)供水、衛(wèi)生設(shè)施與個人衛(wèi)生，他來到孟買東邊約400公里處的拉杜爾地區(qū)，向民眾倡導(dǎo)洗手是一種健康的保障?？ū葼柊l(fā)現(xiàn)，在拉杜爾，就像在馬哈拉什特拉邦其他地區(qū)一樣，許多村民不重視洗手。他回憶說：“他們意識不到洗手有任何實(shí)質(zhì)影響?！?/p>

That was long before the COVID-19 pandemic.

這是早在COVID-19大流行之前的事了。

On March 24, the same day Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered India's more than 1.3 billion citizens to stay inside their homes for at least three weeks -- a period he later extended -- researchers at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom released a study documenting a strong correlation between the size of a country's COVID-19 outbreak and the weakness of its handwashing culture. That survey too was done before COVID-19.

3月24日，印度總理納倫德拉·莫迪下令全國超過13億人必須待在家中至少三個星期（他后來又延長了這個期限），同一天，英國伯明翰大學(xué)的研究人員發(fā)表了一項(xiàng)研究，證明了一個國家的COVID-19爆發(fā)和欠缺洗手文化存在很強(qiáng)的相關(guān)性。這項(xiàng)調(diào)查也是在COVID-19爆發(fā)前完成的。