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On 20 October 2014, several blogs picked up a rumor claiming that Muslim nurses in the UK could refuse to wash their hands, as the practice conflicts with Islamic (i.e., sharia) law. The story spread with alacrity, sparking outrage on social media sites. The rumor hinged in part on its immediacy, and most iterations included language specifying a very recent change to healthcare guidelines in the United Kingdom: Our attempts to locate recent changes to UK healthcare regulations permitting Muslim nurses to refuse to wash their hands turned up empty, but a blog post from April 2014 made an identical claim: None of the accounts in circulation referenced any news reports, updated regulations, or even unsubstantiated personal experience to support the claim. The only remotely similar account appeared in the UK media in 2010, and that item focused not on Muslim nurses and operating room hygiene, but rather on a Christian hospital worker's complaint that her crucifix necklace had been unfairly banned (due to its sharp edges) while other religious garb (such as hijabs) had not. Near the end of that article, March 2010 hospital uniform guideline updates were addressed with an emphasis on accommodating religious issues regarding modesty in dress without impacting patient care: Another article published in March 2010 reiterated that some guidelines were expanded to clarify the intersection of religious dress and infection control standards (including good hand hygiene): So, while official UK healthcare guidelines were modified in 2010 to accommodate religious dress, the change was not recent to 2014, nor did it permit Muslim nurses to refuse to wash their hands for religious reasons.
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