Care of a Staphylococcus aureus Infection Showering and personal care Caring for your sore Sports and the gym Take care of infections! Pus or drainage from wounds is very infectious. Clean your hands frequently with an antibacterial soap and water or an alcohol-based hand rub, especially after changing your bandages or touching the drainage. It matters how you wash your hands. When using soap and water, you have to rub your hands for at least 20 seconds to get rid of the bacteria. When using alcohol-based hand sanitizer, use enough to cover all the surfaces of your hands. This 11x17 poster shows the six steps for washing hands with soap and water or two for cleaning with alcohol-based hand sanitizers. Take a bath or shower often, be sure to use soap to clean your body while showering or bathing. Do not share towels, wash cloths, razors, or other personal items. If you get a cut or scrape on your skin, clean it with soap and water and then cover it with a bandage.
Do not touch sores; if you do touch a sore, clean your hands right away. Keep the infected area covered with clean, dry bandages. Cover any infected sores with a bandage and clean your hands right away after putting on the bandage. Wear clothes that cover your bandages and sores, if possible. Throw used dressings away promptly. Poster showing the steps for how to change your bandages. Do not participate in contact sports until your sores have healed. Do not go to a public gym, sauna, hot tub or pool until sores have healed. You need to be careful when you do laundry. Dirty clothes and bedding can spread staph or MRSA bacteria. When touching your laundry or changing your sheets, hold the dirty laundry away from your body and clothes to prevent bacteria from getting on your clothes. Wear disposable gloves to touch laundry that is soiled with body fluids, like drainage from a sore, urine or feces. Immediately put the laundry into the washer or into a plastic bag until it can be washed.
Wash your laundry with warm or hot water, use bleach if possible. Dry in a warm or hot dryer and make sure the clothes are completely dry. Clean your hands after touching dirty sheets or clothing and before touching clean laundry, even if you have been wearing gloves. Throw gloves away after taking them off (do not reuse them) and clean your hands. Change your sheets and towels at least once a week. Change your clothes daily. Do not put dirty clothes or clothes you have just worn back in your closet or drawers until they have been washed. Clean frequently used areas of your home (bathrooms, countertops, etc.) daily with a household disinfectant or bleach solution. Pay attention to items that are frequently touched - light switches, doorknobs, phones, toilets, sinks, tubs and showers and kitchen counters. Wipe the surface or object with the disinfectant and let it dry. You can use any cleaner you buy at the grocery store that has the word “disinfectant” on it, remember to read the label and follow the directions
Make your own solution of bleach and water: Mix two teaspoons bleach into one quart of water in a spray bottle and label it “bleach solution” Make it fresh each time you plan to clean because the bleach evaporates out of the water making it less effective Never mix bleach with other cleaners, especially ammonia Keep the bleach solution away from children and don’t put it in bottles that could be mistaken for something to drink. It is important that you clean daily. Especially items or surfaces you touch often. Updated Thursday, May 29, 2014 at 09:31AMWe tend to believe that our homes are clean, cozy places. But no matter how vigilant we might be with housecleaning, there are places that get filled with undesirable things such as dust mites, fungal elements, fecal matter, pollen, dander, and dead human cells. What’s worse, one of those hotbeds of germs is the very place you rest for a sweet slumber. Some of the 500 million cells we shed daily, along with our perspiration, pollen, pet dander, fungi, and mold, are all snuggling in bed with us at night.
If that isn’t enough to inspire you wash your sheets regularly, consider that more than 84 percent of beds in America have dust mites, and they love to live in our sheets and feed off of our dead skin. According to Lisa Ackerley, MD, a U.K.-based hygiene doctor, if you don’t wash your sheets weekly, you could be putting yourself at risk of serious viruses and infections, including skin and wound infections, urinary tract infections, pneumonia, and even bacteraemia (blood stream infection). Although experts recommend that sheets be washed at least once a week, a survey of men conducted by the mattress company Ergoflex found that nearly half (49 percent) of single men wash their sheets only four times a year! Women are slightly more conscientious. In a recent Yahoo survey of nearly 1,200 women, 44 percent of respondents said they wash their sheets once a week, 31 percent said they wash them twice a month, and 16 percent said they wash them only once a month. Some 32 percent of readers said that they almost never change out their pillows.
The best way to get rid of all that yucky stuff is to wash your sheets a minimum of once a week using the hottest temperature suggested on the care label. The hotter the water, the more likely you are to kill most of the germs, remove dust mites, and stop pollen from sticking to the fabric, which is especially important if you have allergies, according to research in the Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology. These are the common laundry mistakes that could be damaging your stuff. MORE: Don’t Freak Out, But Your Showerhead Is Filthier Than You ThinkJolie Kerr is a cleaning expert and advice columnist. She'll be here every week helping to answer your filthiest questions. Check the Squalor Archive for assistance. Are you still dirty? Okay, well, this is crazy, and I'm still a little shocked right now. I just woke up in the act of wetting the bed for the first (second? time in my adult life. I'm not afraid of cleaning up urine, and I think I even know some things to do: The sheets are already off so it wouldn't soak into the foam mattress, I found some odor spray, and I'm soaking up the liquid as fast/best I can.
Here's the twist, though: It's not my bed. I'm at my girlfriend's mother's house ... and said mother is SITTING IN THE DINING ROOM AT 5 A.M.!!!!! Currently, I'm hoping she's awake because she's going out early, in which case I can spring into action (?). But meanwhile, you popped into my head, and I thought I'd ask for advice on the best way to ninja-clean my way out of this while everyone's asleep. Damage so far: two sheets, some underpants I can throw in the trash, and a little urine on my (fast-drying) shirt. It says a tremendous amount about me that it wasn't until my third reading of this question that I thought to myself, "You know? It's a little weird that a stranger thinks of me first in the face of wetting the bed." I mean, I get it. obviously get it—and I entirely love it—but every once in a while, I catch myself taking a step back and looking at this life I've created for myself and am just like, "Hm. Existential ramblings aside, this is a not-uncommon thing to have happen.
Wicked embarrassing, to be sure, but not uncommon. Please take solace in that if it happens to you! In an ideal world, this kind of thing happens when it's just you in the bed. In an ideal world, this doesn't happen at all, but you know what I mean.) If it happens when there's someone else in the bed, though, you gotta 'fess up. Mostly because you have to get the sheets off the bed in order to clean them and prevent the pee from seeping into the mattress, and stripping the sheets is a thing that the other person in the bed will notice is happening. In this particular case, I would suggest enlisting your girlfriend to help with the awkward mother issue—have her throw the sheets in the wash and tell her mom she got her period unexpectedly. You may owe her one, but for whatever this is worth: If it were me, I would absolutely no doubt rather lie to my mother about a period accident than tell her that my boyfriend wet the bed. If you really, absolutely cannot get to the washing machine, head into the bathroom to do a little hand-washing triage.
If there's a tub, that's probably going to be your best bet, since hand-washing a section of bed linens is a bit of an awkward affair. So: Run the pee-pee part of the sheet under cold-to-lukewarm running water to flush out as much as you can. Use a small amount of whatever soap you can access most easily (hand soap, bar soap, liquid laundry detergent if it's around, whatevs) and rub the material against itself to create suds and coax out the piddle. Then rinse thoroughly under running water and wring out as much water as you can. Next, grab a towel and roll the wet part of the sheet up in it, which will extrude more water. The final step in this stealthy, MacGyver-esque sheet-washing process is to turn a hair dryer on the remaining wet spot until it's dry enough to go back on the bed. But really, don't do that. Just stick with the period lie and launder the sheets in the machine.In this case, the mattress was spared, because our bed-wetter woke up as the wetting was happening. But more often than not, that isn't the case, so I'm including general mattress-cleaning instructions here, because I'm a giver.
The biggest thing to remember when treating stains on a mattress is to use as little liquid as possible—if you saturate it, it will take forever to dry. Of course, in the case of wetting the bed, the mattress will already be fairly wet, so the first step should be to soak up as much of the urine as you can using either a towel (that you will later launder, natch) or paper towels. Since urine is a protein stain, you'll want to use something enzymatic on it. If you have pets in the house, go ahead and use whatever product you've got for cleaning the messes they make off your floors, carpets, furniture, whatever. Something like Nature's Miracle would be just grand. If you don't have that, a laundry pre-treatment spray like Shout or Zout will also work. Give the soiled part of the mattress a light misting, then give it a li'l scrubbing with a towel or sponge, then bear down on the area with a dry towel to absorb as much moisture as you can. You may want to perform a few light applications for maximum effect.
Once you feel confident that the mattress is clean, allow it to air-dry before putting the sheets back on. (Turning a standing fan toward the mattress will speed that process up.) If, for whatever reason, there's still a lingering odor once the mattress has dried, sprinkle a liberal amount of baking soda on the affected area and allow it to sit for 30 or so minutes before sweeping or vacuuming it up.There are your "Oh no no no no no, I wet the bed!" instructions. A word of warning: Don't read this and think to yourself, "I will never need this; I am a grown-up who does not wet the bed!" Because if you do that, you know what's gonna happen? Jolie Kerr is the author of the book My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag … And Other Things You Can't Ask Martha (Plume); more of her cleaning-obsessed natterings can be found on Twitter, Kinja, and Tumblr. Adequate Man is Deadspin's new self-improvement blog, dedicated to making you just good enough at everything. Suggestions for future topics are welcome below.