ABU DHABI // A majority of residents in the UAE have improved their hand-washing habits because of illnesses such as the Mers coronavirus, a survey suggests.
Fifty-one per cent of participants in an online poll said they washed their hands more frequently after news stories about infections and viruses, the survey, conducted by a US company, said.
Thirty-four per cent said they washed their hands more thoroughly or for longer after the news coverage.
Concern also increased about other illnesses, with two-thirds of respondents saying they were now more worried about the flu than they were last year.
Eighty per cent of respondents said they always washed their hands after using a public washroom.
The poll was part of the online Health Hand Washing Survey, conducted by the Bradley Corporation, a US manufacturer of commercial plumbing fixtures.
Between May 5 to May 9, surveyors asked 550 adults about their hand-washing habits in public restrooms, the company said.
Fifty-five per cent of respondents were female, while 45 per cent were male, ranging in age from 18 to 54.
Of the respondents, 36 per cent were from Dubai, 35 per cent were from Abu Dhabi, 17 per cent were from Sharjah and the rest were from other emirates.
Health authorities have advised people to take basic sanitary precautions.
These include hand washing, thoroughly cooking meat before eating and pasteurising milk before drinking, to prevent respiratory illnesses such as the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, which first emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012.
newsdesk@thenational.ae
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What is graphene?
Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged like honeycomb.
It was discovered in 2004, when Russian-born Manchester scientists Andrei Geim and Kostya Novoselov were "playing about" with sticky tape and graphite - the material used as "lead" in pencils.
Placing the tape on the graphite and peeling it, they managed to rip off thin flakes of carbon. In the beginning they got flakes consisting of many layers of graphene. But as they repeated the process many times, the flakes got thinner.
By separating the graphite fragments repeatedly, they managed to create flakes that were just one atom thick. Their experiment had led to graphene being isolated for the very first time.
At the time, many believed it was impossible for such thin crystalline materials to be stable. But examined under a microscope, the material remained stable, and when tested was found to have incredible properties.
It is many times times stronger than steel, yet incredibly lightweight and flexible. It is electrically and thermally conductive but also transparent. The world's first 2D material, it is one million times thinner than the diameter of a single human hair.
But the 'sticky tape' method would not work on an industrial scale. Since then, scientists have been working on manufacturing graphene, to make use of its incredible properties.
In 2010, Geim and Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. Their discovery meant physicists could study a new class of two-dimensional materials with unique properties.
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- 1490: Meteor storm over Shansi Province, north-east China when large stones “fell like rain”, reportedly leading to thousands of deaths.
- 1908: 100-metre meteor from the Taurid Complex explodes near the Tunguska river in Siberia with the force of 1,000 Hiroshima-type bombs, devastating 2,000 square kilometres of forest.
- 1998: Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 breaks apart and crashes into Jupiter in series of impacts that would have annihilated life on Earth.
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