Even if we wash our hands, eating food which has Giardia’s cysts will infect us, am I right?
And if we won’t wash our hands, the cysts will get on our hands but we’re not little children to put our hands in mouth so how is this harmful?
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Do you want to shake someone’s hand, they make food and get giardia? It’s just a good precaution to take
You would be surprised how often we all touch our faces on a regular basis. Remember when we were advised not to touch our face When covid hit? super difficult.
furthermore, having any form of infectious stuff on your hands will get that stuff everywhere your hands go. Imagine touching a plate just to move it out of the way and then someone else eats from it.
Well, in this case the obvious answer is the correct one. If you are consuming food or liquid that contains viable giardia cysts, that’s a great way to become sick with giardia. The idea of course being that you are *cooking* your food and boiling or sanitizing your water before you consume it. But you can’t boil your hands. So if you dip a bottle into a stream with cysts, and you sanitize the water, that’s safe to drink. But in doing so you probably got some cysts on your hands so you wash them.
As far as not being a child, have you actually thought about how often people touch their mouth/nose? I remember a study early in COVID that estimated that a person will touch their face, on average, every two minutes. Multiply that by the hours and hours a cyst might remain on your filthy unwashed hands, and you get the idea.
The key is in food preperation and eating. It’s almost impossible to not lay hands on food when cooking and it’s very common to hold food in your hand when you eat it. Even utensils aren’t foolproof as you need to store and retrieve them, getting them contaminated with unwashed hands.
Regular hand washing just adds another layer of defense.
>the cysts will get on our hands but we’re not little children to put our hands in mouth
Not necessarily, but you could transfer the cysts to any food you touch or prepare.
The minimum infectious dose for Giardia is ten. Ten cysts of microscopic size to successfully infect a person. It is incredibly easy to transfer that to your mouth without ever knowing it.
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