Letters: Outdoor nursery fears are shortsighted

We have chosen to send our sons to the Secret Garden, and we fully support the nursery and its wonderful staff. We want our children to enjoy outdoor environments as much as we do, with reasonable precautions but without fear of the outdoors and lurking "germs".

We take them out in the woods and the mountains, but, like every other hill-walker we know, we do not carry extra water for hand-washing: our boys use wipes or hand sanitisers.

The latest recommendations of Health Protection Scotland that our children should have to wash their hands with running water every time they cough, sneeze, or have visibly dirty hands (Comment, 30 August) would completely undermine their enjoyment of playing outdoors.

Such procedures would also be totally impossible for any nursery to implement, even without the need for staff to carry half a litre of water for each hand wash.

Does the nanny state allow for parental choice?

(DRS) Rob & Sue Armstrong

Guardbridge

Fife

As a parent of a child who attends the Secret Garden Outdoor Nursery two days per week, I am dismayed at the recent attempts to restrict its nomadic nature, and furthermore to jeopardise its very existence by insisting upon impracticably stringent hand hygiene procedures involving soap and running water.

No scientific research is available to suggest that the nursery's current practice of using hand wipes and a hand sanitiser to clean hands is inadequate; in any case, this practice goes beyond what we, as a family, would typically do if outdoors with our children ourselves.

In the woodland environment, I fail to see how the children would independently perform the rigmarole that hand washing with soap and water entails without significant adult assistance, yet I have witnessed my daughter (aged three) successfully clean her hands outside with wipes and a sanitiser, and inside with soap and water (without a reminder to lather).

Even in an indoor nursery where soap and running water are available, how many children "remember" (or even know how) to wash their hands (despite the Scottish Government's multi-million pound campaign)?

My daughter knows how to because the importance of hand hygiene is emphasised at the Secret Garden, and - significantly - because the procedures that are currently in place are not so unwieldy that they put her off from doing so.

(Dr) Sharon Hedley

Denhead

St Andrews, Fife

The Secret Garden Outdoor Nursery in Fife has been running successfully for some time now.

Its future is threatened by the Care Commission as there is no running water and therefore no facilities for hand washing on site.

All the families who have enrolled their children were made aware of this and are happy to accept the arrangements of wipes and anti-bacterial spray.

Why can't parents be allowed to make decisions about their children's activities any more without some body or another interfering?

Outdoor activities are an important factor in children's health and wellbeing. Please, leave them alone.

The implications for many other outdoor activities are enormous.

J Gillespie

Denhead

St Andrews

According to Health Protection Scotland (HPS), "no rural environment can be considered free of E coli O157 contamination".

HPS cites this claim to justify its imposition of a burdensome soap and water handwashing regime on the flagship Secret Garden Outdoor Nursery in Fife. The E coli O157 serotype occurs naturally in the intestines of cattle.

Its principal mode of transmission to human beings is via bovine faeces that enter the human food chain, as in the 1996 Wishaw outbreak in which 21 people died.

Pathogenic transmission can occur via faecal toxins in beef (as in Wishaw), in unpasteurised dairy products or via groundwater contamination of root crops.

It can also occur readily from human to human in enclosed environments such as nurseries or daycare centres.

The upshot is that no rural or urban environment in which food is prepared for domestic or institutional catering purposes "can be considered free" of E coli contamination, if that means that there is a non-zero risk that the pathogen is present.

I trust that the HPS guidance will be extended to other branches of the Government to advise service-users, customers and tourists that none of Scotland's schools, care centres, nurseries, restaurant, pubs or leisure centres can be considered E. coli-free.

Alternatively, we could go back to taking a sane attitude towards risk, and let the nursery get on with its UK-leading initiative.

(Prof) Glen Newey

Pittenweem

Fife