It's safer to kiss

The Spanish-style peck on the cheek is far more hygienic than the trusty British handshake, according to health experts.

While a quick air kiss - or two - somewhere in the cheek region is a relatively-germ free affair, hand-shaking it seems is another matter.

No matter how clean one person keeps their hands, unfortunately there is just no guarantee that the person on the other end of the greeting maintains such stringent standards.

Professor Sally Bloomfield, from the London School of Hygiene and chairman of the International Scientific Forum on Home Hygiene, which carried out the research, said: "The hands are critical in the chain of infection as they transmit infections from surfaces to people and between people.

"Shaking hands is the main form of physical contact with each other but you don't know what the other person has been touching before you greet them. People avoid kissing each other when they have a cold, but in fact they are more likely to pass on an infection by shaking someone's hand."

The report details how germs that cause stomach infections such as salmonella, campylobacter and norovirus can also circulate directly from person to person via our hands.

As for greetings. Experts are agreed that the air-kiss which avoids contact all together is best. But tread carefully, kissing etiquette can be thorny.

An earlier study revealed that he way you turn your head when you greet someone identifies how emotional you are.

It found that bout 80 per cent of men and women turned their heads to the right when kissing cheek-to-cheek, a gesture of real feeling. But the rest, who leaned to the left used less emotional parts of their brain and were not really making a warm gesture at all, the scientists said.