Te Radar: Pontius Pilate, New Zealand needs you...

To be chastised as a nation for failing to wash our hands correctly is bad enough. To then be told that we are even worse at drying them causes me to wonder if the research people were taking the proverbial, or whether we are indeed a realm of retards.

The Tork Hygiene Survey revealed that many of us are deficient in our hand-hygiene regimes.

I have always believed that my immune system is strengthened by continual exposure to low-level bacterial threats provided by an almost complete rejection of hand-washing, combined with eating off recently abandoned plates in food courts, and shaking hands with television executives.

It strikes me that if we are to wash our hands when going to the toilet, it should be done before, and not subsequent to, the expulsion of waste.

After all, I know where my hands have been prior to the event, and I know that what they are handling is not filthy. Ergo, washing our hands first keeps our vitals more hygienic, thus reducing the need to wash our hands afterwards, unless you are somewhat clumsy.

The whole saga has become more significant due to the threat of the bird flu pandemic.

According to Those Who Claim to Know, the best defence against this contagion is simply to wash our hands.

I haven't felt so reassured by any official advice since I saw an instructional video that said crouching under thin wooden desks would protect people from the brief unpleasantness of a nuclear attack.

I would have thought that it might be more appropriate when attempting to avoid bird flu to refrain from being sneezed on by poultry, and at the first sign of the virus here to immediately institute a rigorous campaign of hen-icide.

When it comes to drying our hands, it appears that 46 per cent of us have no idea that doing this properly is as important as washing them. I had always assumed that this was the reason jeans were invented.

Apparently not.

A mixture of paper towels and hot air is reputed to be the best combination. If we have access only to hot air driers, we should, we are told, utilise them for a full 45 seconds.

Clearly the people who issued this diktat have not heard that we are facing a national power crisis. Nor have they fathomed that anyone monopolising a hand drier for 45 seconds is more likely to face a health crisis caused through being highly annoying, as opposed to one caused by microbes.

On a more positive note, the threat of bird flu is something that doesn't trouble us unduly as a nation.

Eleven per cent of people, however, say they wouldn't go to work if there were a bird flu outbreak.

What is shocking about this is how few people this represents. There would be a far larger percentage of people who wouldn't go to work if it meant missing a Rugby World Cup final.