Up front, I’ll tell you I’ve never had the flu or a cold, nor have my children. We are genetically predisposed to being healthy and this is a plus for us. We do get bacterial infections from time to time – we’re particularly vulnerable to strep, bacterial bronchitis, and the rare bacterial pneumonia. Again, this is very good for us because we can take medications that will help us heal faster.
Other than inheriting good genes, we practice good flu manners so we reduce even further our risk of getting viral diseases like flu, the common cold, or stomach viruses. By practicing good flu manners, we prevent the spread of viral diseases to our classmates, co-workers, family members not as genetically blessed as ourselves, and friends, not to mention those strangers in the crowded situations.
The number one most important thing we can do to reduce our risk and to not be a carrier of disease ourselves is to be clean – wash our hands frequently, avoid touching others during flu season, wiping down the surfaces where we work. I don’t recommend using anti-bacterial washes because they are ineffective against viruses. Plain soap works just fine.
Now, to the specifics: handwashing. Before you wash your hands, pull out two sheets of paper towels and set them by the sink. When you wash your hands, don’t just pass them under the water with maybe a squirt of soap. Actually take the time to scrub your hands as if you were preparing for surgery. Rub the soap to a thick lather, and be sure to get under your nails and in the creases of your knuckles. Wash up to your elbows if your clothing allows, otherwise wash as high up your arms as you can.
Use the air dryer if there is one, and if not, use the top paper towel you set out to dab off the worst of the wet. If your hands are still damp, take a third paper towel to finish drying your hands, and use the used towels to pick up and discard the first paper towel that acted as a barrier between the counter top and your towel. Some people use these towels or a fourth clean towel to open the door of the bathroom and then discard that last towel in the trash can in the hallway or in their office.
This is a good practice when there are people at school or work who are ill with either a bacterial or viral disease. The barrier of the paper towel prevents the spread of the bacteria or virus to you – and prevents you, if you are the sick one, from leaving your bacteria or viruses behind.
If you are ill and sneezing or coughing, practice good sneeze-and-cough etiquette: Turn your head away from others and cough or sneeze into a tissue or your elbow. Why your elbow? Because you are less likely to get the bacteria or virus on your hands, thus keeping them cleaner and keeping yourself and those about you healthier.
Wipe your phone with a cleaning wipe or fresh damp paper towel. Avoid disinfecting it with anti-bacterial wipes – they won’t do a thing for viruses. Soapy towels do a much better job of cleaning and you’re more likely to clean better with a soapy towel than an anti-bacterial towelette.
Move everything off your desk ad give it a good wipe down with a soapy towel and rinse at least once a day. If you share a cubicle or desk with other students or employees, wipe it down before you use it.
Do not shake hands or touch other people in case they aren’t practicing good flu manners. If you can’t get out of shaking someone’s hand, wash as soon after as you can. Don’t touch your face or clothes so the virus isn’t spread around.
Keep yourself gently but persistently hydrated with beverages such as ginger ale, root beer, warm broth, peppermint tea, chamomile tea, or water. At work, if you’re allowed one, keep a beverage warmer on your desk to keep your hot drink warm as you sip small amounts all day. A lid on the drink serves two very useful purposes: one, it will help retain heat in your drink, and two, it will protect it from the co-worker who spews their sneeze all over your desk.
Avoid crowds if you can, particularly crowds with children in them because the children may not have learned good flu manners yet or they get excited or distracted and forget. The biggest reason most people hired a babysitter was to protect their children from flus, colds, and other easily transmitted diseases. I suppose nowadays, parents would rather pay the expenses of a doctor's visit and having to take sick leave to care for a child who got sick from the exposure to others than have the short term savings of not paying a babysitter. If they take a sick child out in public, I suppose they are more concerned about their own comfort than the miserable sick child, and they feel the savings justifies the child's misery. Babysitters were hired not just to watch the child while the parents were away, but to protect the child from being exposed to diseases - or, if the child was sick, from contaminating others and to keep the child comfortable.
If you do become ill anyway, a good co-worker or student would stay home during the contagious course of the disease. Modern employers and schools are not sympathetic to contagious diseases and they don’t allow for the health and well-being of their employees/students – or even themselves. If you must go to school or work in spite of being ill, practice good flu manners, isolate yourself as much as possible from your co-workers, wash your hands frequently, wipe your desk down two or three times a day, use tissues for coughs and sneezes, and if you must cough or sneeze with no handy tissue, do so into your sleeve or elbow and wash up as soon after as you can. Wearing gloves doesn’t work to keep co-workers from catching what you have because the virus will simply inhabit the outside of the gloves, however, wearing gloves will prevent you from catching viruses from your coworkers if you use disposable gloves or ones you can wash as if your hands were bare.
Before flu season starts, take steps to make yourself less vulnerable to colds and flus. Keep yourself well-hydrated, well-fed, mildly exercised, and well-rested.
Gentle but persistent hydration is the best way to go. Don’t take big swallows of liquids, just small, frequent sips. Avoid caffeine and sugars if you can, but don’t stress out over it. If you feel you need that double-shot espresso in your coffee, go ahead and drink it, just be sure you’re drinking other beverages, too – for each cup of coffee, try drinking an equal amount of water. Except for some of the milder, naturally caffeine free teas, like rosehip, chamomile, or peppermint, I recommend drinking an equal amount of water with any beverage you drink – coffee, apple juice, orange juice, cranberry juice, black teas (hot or iced), sodas. Just keep both on your desk and alternate sips. I sometimes have as many of 5 different drinks on my desk in flu season.
Add good fats to your winter and flu season diet. Eat more vegetables and whole grains, go lighter on the meats. The easiest way to eat well is to make up hot or cold salads, like tabbouleh or fruited tuna salad or couscous. Asian or hearty stews are also good to eat in the winter and during flu season to boost your immune system and help keep you healthier.
Mild exercise will also get those endorphins moving and boost the immune system – stretching, Wii fitness programs, an exercise bike or treadmill, walking, or biking for 10 – 20 minutes a day. Routine housework, parking at the far end of the parking lot, climbing stairs instead of taking the crowded elevators – these count towards those 10 – 20 minutes of exercise so you may not have to add anything to your regular routine.
For millennia, we were strongly seasonal creatures – active and busy and sleeping shorter hours in the long summer days and while still busy, the busy-ness was more sedate and we slept longer hours in the darkness of winter. Our bodies are still programmed for that seasonal schedule but our lifestyle has changed dramatically. We’re a 24-hour species now, working night shifts and partying or studying late. To stay healthy, we have to recognize that times may have changed, but our physical needs haven’t. We need more rest and more sleep in the winter than we do in the summer, so plan your schedule to give yourself an extra hour of sleep every night, or an extra hour of relaxation where you aren’t scurrying around getting work done. Lie in a massage chair, take soaking hot baths instead of a quick shower, get into your PJs early in the evening, turn your ringers off on your phones and let them go to voice mail if there is no life-and-death situation going on (ie, a family member is in intensive care, you’re waiting to hear a traveler has arrived safely, etc.), if you can disconnect your doorbell or hang a sign asking not to be disturbed, do so, and relax a bit before you go to bed, then sleep well. Your body will thank you by being healthier, stronger, and more alert.
If you do get sick anyway, respond quickly. First determine what type of illness you have.
Colds have to run their 10 day course, there’s not a lot you can do to speed it up. You can take hot showers, use hot facial steamers and/or humidifiers to help with breathing and clogged sinuses, practice persistent hydration, and take an aspirin or acetaminophen before bed to reduce night fevers that will keep you awake and make you miserable. Home made chicken soup also helps because it loosens phlegm, soothes sore throats from coughing, helps gently hydrate you, and provides you with essential healing fats and vitamins. Hot peppermint tea will also loosen clogged sinuses, help coughs be productive, and soothes sore throats. When you make the tea, use the hot teabags as poultices on your sinuses to make them feel better – the heat is more useful than the herb, but the scent of the peppermint is soothing. Hot cocoa also provides essential healing fats if you make it with real milk instead of just hot water and a powdered packet of cocoa mix, although it still provides relief from both the heat and fluids. By the time you get sick, Echinacea is no longer effective. It’s better as a preventive than as a cure. Zinc cough drops can reduce throat irritations from sinus drainage and may actually reduce coughs. Slippery Elm bark lozenges reduce coughs by soothing sore throats, too. Both of these can be taken as frequently as you need to, although the zinc cough drops contain a lot of sugar and are very caloric. Slippery elm lozenges usually lack added sugars, check the ingredient label to be sure the brand you buy is mostly slippery elm bark. Wild cherry bark and real licorice root will actually stop coughs and so I recommend them only at bedtime when you need to sleep. Coughing is your body’s way of healing, so you want to cough to keep the sinuses draining out the toxins and prevent the cold from becoming bronchitis or pneumonia.
If you are prone to flus, it may be worth it for you to get a flu shot. Those of us who are naturally immune shouldn’t compromise our health with unnecessary medications or vaccinations that may actually weaken us. The flu shot will not stop you from getting the flu, there are too many varieties out there and the shots will target only the ones the pharmacological industry thinks will be the prominent ones each year. The flu shot will reduce the severity of the flu you will get. If you suspect you have the flu – see your doctor as soon as possible. There are medications that will drastically reduce the time you will be sick and will reduce the severity of the flu so you suffer less. Other than that, treat the flu pretty much the same as you treat a cold.
How do you tell the difference between a cold or the flu, since they share many of the same symptoms?
This nifty little program is very good to help you determine which you have quickly as long as you are brutally honest. Don’t try to hide symptoms, don’t exaggerate, and it will work for you.
If you don’t have access to this program, a flu will have chills, fever, headache, sever chest discomfort, and fatigue with a dry cough. You won’t sneeze. You may have a sore throat from coughing, and your sinuses may clog from coughing but will clear easily between coughing bouts.
A cold will have a hacking cough with sneezing, sore throat, stuffy nose, and some chest discomfort, but generally only a low grade fever that comes on at night. You may have a headache from your sinuses and from coughing, but it will feel different than a flu headache, which more closely resembles a migraine.
It’s possible to have both a cold and the flu at the same time. If that’s the case, go see the doctor, be treated for the flu, and expect it to take at least 2 weeks to get better.
Wash your hands after touching any of these surfaces:
The outsides of book bags, back packs, and women’s purses and the insides of wallets, particularly men’s wallets as those are generally kept in a pants pocket with ideal bacterial growth temperatures. You can reduce the bacterial and viral contamination of bags and purses by not ever putting them on the floor. Put them on benches, chairs, or hang them from tables with those table hanger devices. Wallets can be kept in briefcases instead of pockets. There’s not a lot you can do about germy paper money except to wash your hands after handling it.
Remote controls, particularly ones in hotel rooms, are very germy. I recommend disinfecting them before handling them, and I bet the remote controllers for those hideous sleep number beds are the same way. In fact, I disinfect all the surfaces in a hotel room as soon as I check in and enter it – lamp switches, remotes, phones, door knobs, drawer pulls, and curtain rod pulls. Those rarely get the cleaning they need and they are all surfaces others have touched, sometimes a lot.
If you have an illness in the house, wash your clothes with hot water and use the dryer for a full 45 minutes to kill bacteria. Either use a separate sorting table for clean and dirty clothes or wipe the table between loads. Wash the germiest clothing last – undergarments and bedsheets from the sick person. Do laundry that requires bleach as the first load and the bleach will continue to work through subsequent loads. Polyester and other synthetic fibers hold germs longer than natural fibers so our laundry is germier now than it was even 50 years ago.
Drinking water fountains have more than twice as many fecal and E. coli germs as toilet seats. Draw your drinking water from the kitchen or bathroom faucet rather than a drinking fountain, or use bottled water during flu and cold season.
Push buttons at ATMS, elevators, vending machines, and similar places are rarely cleaned well and handled by a lot of people. Touch them with a disposable tissue and toss the tissue as soon as possible, or knuckle them, or use a pen or stylus, or let someone else push the buttons. You can also disinfect them before touching them, but it won’t last long.
Exercise mats and a lot of gym equipment is about as germy as it gets. Use those thin yoga booties and gloves to put a barrier between you and a not-so-clean mat or handlebars. Use the alcohol cleansers between each equipment change and use the disinfecting wipes many gyms now provide – or bring your own. This is the same for massage equipment. Before you stick your face into the hole for a massage, disinfect it and put a layer of tissue between it and you.
The dirtiest public restrooms are the ones on airplanes, and the cleanest ones are the public ones in hospitals. The airplane bathrooms get cleaned, but on average, each bathroom serves 75 people and the sink is so small many people, especially men, skimp on hand washing, so no matter how frequently they get cleaned, you have a much higher than average chance of catching something from a previous user.
Shopping carts are terrible paces to put food. People sneeze and cough on them, and children’s butts ride in them and they get their unwashed hands all over them. Wiping a cart down completely with disinfecting wipes and alcohol cleansers makes a great deal of sense during flu and cold season, and possibly other times of the year as well. Or you can do as I do, bring a shopping cart liner to keep your food from touching the cart and clean the areas you will be touching with disinfecting wipes and alcohol cleaners.
If you do these things, people may think you’re obsessively clean, but you’ll also be healthier. A few wipes and alcohol gel cleaners are much cheaper than a single doctor’s visit, and much cheaper for businesses to pay for than covering absent employees. If businesses really cared about their bottom line, they’d focus on prevention rather than sick leave and health insurance. Wipes, gels, soaps, and paper towels are so much cheaper than costly absences and outrageous health premiums.
To summarize:
Flu Symptoms
chills
fever
headache
severe chest discomfort
fatigue
dry cough
Cold Symptoms
hacking cough
sneezing
sore throat
stuffy nose
mild chest discomfort
low grade night time fever
Flu and Cold Manners
Cough or sneeze away from people
Cough or sneeze into a tissue or your shirt sleeve (elbow)
Stay home during contagious period
Avoid touching others
Wipe surfaces clean with soap (antibacterial doesn't work on viruses)
Wash your hands frequently
Stay hydrated
Avoid crowds
Use a barrier (paper towel, tissue) for opening doors, especially bathroom doors
Get a flu shot if you are at risk
See medical help promptly for flu
Eat well
Rest well
Stay exercised
Flu and Cold Care
For flu seek prompt medical help
Don't see the doctor for colds unless it persists longer than 10 days
Rest
Stay hydrated
Eat well (soups are good)
Wash hands often
Zinc or slippery elm lozenges
Wash laundry in hot water and dry for 45 minutes to kill germs
Fold laundry on a clean surface - clean between loads
Avoid Touching Directly
Or at least use a barrier before touching or wash your hands well as soon after touching as possible:
Outsides of purses, bags, back packs, briefcases, luggage
Insides of wallets
Money (coins or paper)
Hotel or public lamp switches
TV remotes, especially hotel or public ones
Hotel Sleep Number bed remotes
Public or office phones
Door knobs
Hotel drawer pulls
Hotel curtain rod pulls
Public drinking water fountains
ATM push buttons
Vending machine buttons
Public door handles
Gym Exercise mats
Gym Exercise equipment handlebars
Public restrooms
Shopping carts and baskets
So, be a bit obsessive and be healthy this flu season.