With cold and flu season underway, and the recent pandemic outbreak, we all want to do what we can to avoid getting sick. Unlike bacterial infections that can quickly be cleared up with a round of antibiotics, with sicknesses caused by viruses like the flu or the common cold, you often have to ride it out. While there are medications that can help ease your symptoms, your immune system must fight the viral infection off. Why not take it easy on your body and do what you can to avoid catching it in the first place?
Wash Your Hands – still the best procedure
Your first line of defense to avoid getting sick this year is simple – Wash Your Hands. That’s right. The simple act of washing your hands frequently with soap and hot water limits the spread of cold and flu viruses and your chance of coming down with them. Get in the habit of washing your hands whenever you’ve been out in public, and whenever you can throughout the workday. Wash them before you eat or drink food and when hot water and soap aren’t available, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer.
Why is this so important? Because you are more likely to pick those viruses up with your hands than any other way. Sure, having someone cough in your face doesn’t help, but your chances of getting the flu or coming down with the common cold thanks to contacting with a handrail or doorknob are much higher. You pick the virus up by moving about your day. It could be touching the handle of a shopping cart or closing a door behind you. It’s now on your hands, which isn’t a big problem by itself. It can’t enter through the skin there.
Don’t Touch Your Face
The problem arises when you touch your face. It happens a lot more than most of us are aware of (I am amazed at how many times I reach up to touch my face a day!). We touch our nose, rub our eyes, or get our fingers too close to our mouth when we eat or cough. The virus makes it to a mucous membrane in any of those areas and it’s right where it wants to be.
That’s why it’s important to wash your hands for at least twenty seconds (don’t forget your nails and in between your fingers). Sing happy birthday twice or count out loud to 20. It isn’t some busywork that healthcare professionals give you to make you feel like there’s something you can do. It is your best line of defense. So, what are you waiting for? Go wash your hands.
P.S. I want to encourage you to be careful about the content you circulate through social media. If I get something coming in that I think is interesting or helpful, I google the author to make sure they are legit and then I google the theory, procedure or idea they are proposing and I take a look at it before even thinking about forwarding the info to others.
RECIPE
HOME-MADE HAND SANITIZER (WHO*FORMULA)
Female hands using washing hands with Alcohol Sanitizer isolate on a white background. Promoting people use to protect themselves from virus infection in Coronavirus crisis 2020
Ingredients:
- 1 cup of 91% isopropyl alcohol
- ½ cup of aloe vera gel (natural or store-bought)
- 15 drops of tea tree oil (or another antibacterial essential oil)
Directions:
Get a whisk and beat that hand sanitizer into a homogeneous gel.
*World Health Organization
To Your Health,
Patti
