I've seen people rub their hands with soap before turning on the faucet at all. For no meaningful reason, I'm trying to apply this same practice to my hand washing.<p>Happy Friday.
You should wet your hands before applying soap. Running water is an important part of hand hygiene.<p>The CDC have some useful information about how to wash hands. This link has a bunch of infection control information, but look for the PDF of "Hygiene of the Skin: When is clean too clean?" (<a href="http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/content/7/2/contents.htm" rel="nofollow">http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/content/7/2/contents.htm</a>)<p>Notice the 'Right way to wash your hands' tells you to wet your hands first (but does not say why, frustratingly.) (<a href="http://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/</a>)<p>The WHO have a comprehensive document about hand hygiene in health care, with a lot of information about different solvents and etc etc,
I don't, I think it is wasting water for no reason (of course it has little impact). The only problem is when, at times, I have discovered there is no water through the faucet :(, then I end with my hands full of soap.
Hand washing requires both soap and water.<p>If I were to apply soap first I'd be unable to turn the water on without smearing soap onto the faucet.<p>So yes. I apply water before the soap because getting water on the soap dispenser causes no harm to others -- whereas getting soap on the faucet handle does cause (a tiny amount of) harm.