How to Clean Girls the Right Way?

I see occasionally children with urinary tract infections in my rooms. The majority of those are girls. This is due to the fact that the female urethra is much shorter than the male one and that the anatomical distance to the anus is much shorter for girls than for boys. Most urinary tract infections are what we call ascending – with the germs creeping up the urethra into the bladder and possibly all the way up to the kidneys. A urinary tract infection in toddlers is not uncommon especially after a bout of diarrhoea. One can imagine with a diaper full of runny poo that some of the bugs in that stool have it easy swishing around to the front and creeping up the urethra.

Now for girls there is another way of how the bugs from the buttocks can reach the front area. This is by wiping the buttocks the wrong way around. I have seen many girls with recurrent urinary tract infections and my first question to the parents is usually how they clean the buttocks – from back to front or from front to back. The answer as one mother put it: “when it is a dirty nappy I clean from front to back but otherwise usually from back to front”. My second question to the mothers is then how they clean themselves and the answer is unanimously “from the front to the back”.

So why do it differently in little girls? The buttocks comes in contact with poo which is full of mostly good and some bad bugs. Wiping first the buttocks and then the front brings the bugs right into the area where they can cause urinary tract infections. Even the ‘good bugs’ can cause bad urinary tract infections.

In short:
Wiping direction in girls no matter if one is cleaning urine or stool is ALWAYS from front to back. This will reduce the risk of urinary tract infections significantly.