As the New Year begins, many of us are looking for ways to reset and invest in our health. Like many others, I’ve found myself bombarded with wellness trends and products promising better sleep, sharper focus, longer life, and greater wellbeing. As Executive Director of the Reckitt Global Hygiene Institute, it gave me pause for thought.

In recent years, the focus on health and wellness has accelerated. From biohacking and AI-powered health technologies to longevity-focused products, millions of people are investing time and resources to optimise their wellbeing. While debates continue about the benefits of supplements or cold plunges, the global wellness industry continues to grow at a remarkable speed.

Yet this surge of interest raises a more fundamental question: why are we so willing to focus our attention, even if only briefly, on the latest wearable or “hack”, while spending far less time thinking about the most basic health behaviours that truly save lives?

One of the most fundamental, and often overlooked, is hygiene.

Part of the reason hygiene is overlooked is not because it is ineffective, but because its benefits are diffuse, preventative, and largely invisible when it works. Unlike wearable technologies or supplements, the value of handwashing is measured in infections that never occur, hospital visits avoided, and productivity preserved. These benefits are real, but they are harder to see, quantify, and monetise.

This creates a familiar imbalance: what is easiest to package, market, and sell often receives more attention than what delivers the greatest population-level return. Correcting that imbalance requires stronger evidence, better metrics, and sustained investment in the systems that make prevention possible.

The global wellness industry is forecast to reach $9.8 trillion by 2029, fuelled by technologies that allow people to track sleep, menstrual cycles, UV exposure, and air pollution with a tap on a screen. These tools offer remarkable insights. Yet they sit alongside a striking global blind spot.

In 2024, the World Health Organization and UNICEF released the first-ever global guidelines for hand hygiene in community settings — a recognition that one of the simplest and most effective public health interventions remains deeply underprioritised. While many of us enter 2026 with unprecedented opportunities to optimise our health, 2.3 billion people still lack access to basic handwashing facilities.

The evidence is clear. Proper hand hygiene significantly reduces diarrhoeal and respiratory illnesses, even in high-income settings. Yet for billions of people, the ability to practise this most basic form of prevention remains constrained by a lack of water, sanitation, and enabling infrastructure. This is not a question of awareness or motivation; it is a systems failure.

The timing of these global guidelines is no coincidence. As the international community looks ahead to major milestones — including the UN General Assembly High-Level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response, and the World Health Assembly’s consideration of the Pandemic Agreement — hygiene sits squarely at the intersection of preparedness and equity. COVID-19 made clear that strong hygiene systems are not optional; they are foundational to resilience.

This is why, at RGHI, our focus is not on optimising what already works for some, but on building the evidence base and convening partnerships that enable hygiene to be achievable for all. As RGHI enters its next phase, 2026 is about mobilising investment and partnerships to deepen evidence on what works in real-world conditions, generate insight that supports stronger hygiene systems, and help position hygiene as the global health priority it needs to be.

Transforming global health outcomes does not start with the most sophisticated technology. It starts by ensuring that the fundamentals are not luxuries, and nothing is more fundamental than hygiene.