Joe Kingsley's business — plastic germs — is thriving these days, now that certain real germs are on everyone's mind.

"I don't want to be facetious, but business is good," says Kingsley, president of Glo Germ, a Moab company that sells training kits that show people how poorly they wash their hands.

The Canadian government recently asked for 100,000 of the kits. The World Health Organization wants 3,000. That's because even though hand washing is getting good press these days, most of us often rush through the process, if we remember to wash at all. And even if the H1N1 flu may be less of a threat this spring than originally feared, health experts are cautioning that it may come back with a more deadly punch next fall.

Glo Germ's plastic germs are 98 percent accurate at mimicking how tricky real germs are, Kingsley says, and under ultraviolet light they reveal themselves sticking in between fingers, on the backs of hands, under fingernails.

That's why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wants you to wash your hands for 15 or 20 seconds: not because it takes that long to get germs off your skin but so you'll take the time to clean not just your palms but all the nooks and crannies where germs like to hang out.

University of Utah pathology professor Judy Daly, spokesperson for the American Society of Microbiology's national "clean hands campaign," says that if you sing "Happy Birthday" or the ABCs, that will probably be long enough to get the job done.

Warm water isn't any more effective than cold water to clean your hands of germs, says Alison Lukacsko, a vice president of innovation and business development for Georgia Pacific. The only advantage of warm water, she says, is that it's more pleasant, so people are more likely to scrub longer, and the bigger volume of suds produced in warm water help them see where they've washed.

Lukacsko's company sells paper towels, so it's not surprising that she can speak convincingly about the importance of drying your hands well after you wash up. Any water left on your hands can be a vector that can carry disease, she points out. So if you touch a public doorknob with damp hands, then touch your eyes or mouth, you could pick up a bug.

People who use hot-air hand dryers are often too impatient to really get their hands completely dry, she says, and there's some evidence, she says, that bacteria can actually grow on the dryers and then get blown out into the room.