Jewelry hygiene

Jewelry Hygiene is an area of study focusing on sanitary practices and habits relating to jewelry in an effort to understand jewelry's effect on hand hygiene. There are four key elements to optimally sanitizing jewelry: steam or hot water, water pressure and an antibacterial cleaning agent. Hand hygiene is particularly acute for health workers and those working in the food service industry.

The relationship between wearing rings and the transmission of microorganisms is still unclear. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guideline has categorized this as an "unresolved issue" in need of additional research; the draft WHO guidelines also do not have a stated recommendation against the wearing of rings but note that "the consensus recommendation is to discourage the wearing of rings or other jewelry during healthcare." A number of studies have shown that ring wearing increases the likelihood of bacterial contamination; in particular these studies have demonstrated that the skin under rings can be more heavily colonized than areas of skin without rings and can be a major contributor to hand contamination.

Trick et al. (2003) studied 66 surgical intensive care unit nurses, culturing each staff nurse's hands before and after he or she performed hand hygiene; they found that wearing rings was associated with a 10-fold higher median count of skin microorganisms, especially with yeast species or Gram-negative bacilli and a stepwise increase risk of contamination with any transient organism as the number of rings worn increased.

Another study states that rings were the only substantial risk factor for carriage of Gram-negative bacteria and S. aureus on the hands. Salsbury et al. (1997) found that there was a higher reduction after hand washing by healthcare workers without rings than by those with rings. The study included 100 hospital healthcare workers who worked on general medical and surgical units, excluding those who had used antimicrobial soap in the previous two weeks, had artificial nails, or were receiving antibiotics. Each healthcare worker who wore rings was paired with a worker from the same unit who did not wear rings. Cultures were taken from the solution poured over each healthcare worker's hands as they performed a 60-second friction rinse, done both before and after a routine handwash. Mean total colony counts for those who wore rings were higher before and after hand washing.

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