Defeat Cold and Flu Bugs

(Page 3 of 6)

September/October 2005
By Michael Castleman 
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To break the chain of transmission, practice the following:

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If you have a cold, call in sick. Many cold sufferers insist on going to work, school or other activities and many employers don’t provide adequate leave for sick workers, or don’t offer paid sick days. This greatly increases the risk of infecting everyone in your workplace. If at all possible, stay home for a day or two.

Keep your fingers away from your nose and eyes. This prevents direct-contact transmission. Oddly, this is not as easy as it sounds. If a cold is going around, rub your nose or eyes with a knuckle instead of a possibly contaminated fingertip.

Wash your hands. This prevents direct-contact transmission. At one daycare center, Purdue University researchers taught children, aged 3 to 5, to wash their hands often to prevent colds. Kids at

another daycare center received no hand-washing instruction. During the winter cold and flu season, the kids who washed their hands frequently caught significantly fewer colds.

Use disinfectant on household surfaces. Cold viruses can survive up to several hours on counters, telephone handsets and other hard surfaces. But disinfectants kill them. At the University of Ottawa, Canada, researchers contaminated stainless-steel surfaces with cold virus, then sprayed them with Lysol or wiped them with bleach. Both treatments killed more than 99.5 percent of the cold viruses.

Retire cloth hankies. Live virus can survive for several hours in cloth hankies. Every time you pull them out, you re-contaminate your fingers. Switch to disposable facial tissues. Use them once, then discard them. Afterward, wash your hands.

As Mom and Miss Manners would remind you, cover your mouth when you cough and sneeze. This limits the number of virus particles you release into the air. Wash your hands afterward.

Beat the Flu with a Flu Shot — Plus Ginseng

Many people mistakenly call any bad cold “the flu.” Like colds, flu (short for influenza) is caused by a virus, but flu is a completely different illness. One minute you feel fine, the next, you have a fever and collapse into bed, where you stay for up to several days. Flu also causes cold-like symptoms and body aches. And even after you recover, flu can leave you feeling lethargic for another week or so.

There are two main types of flu, designated A and B. For reasons that remain a mystery, they mutate annually in Asia each spring, so scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can design vaccines by autumn, just in time for the U.S. winter flu season.

Type-B flu is comparatively mild. Type-A flu is the one responsible for periodic worldwide pandemics, like the one in 1918 that killed some 20 million people. But both types of flu can turn into a deadly form of pneumonia that kills an average of 36,000 Americans a year, mostly the elderly and people with chronic respiratory conditions, such as emphysema.

The best defense against the flu is the annual flu shot. The flu shot is especially recommended for people older than 60 and for those with compromised immune systems and chronic respiratory conditions. It’s not 100 percent effective, but even if you catch the flu after getting the shot, you’re likely to have a mild case.

Flu shot effectiveness can be improved by taking ginseng. At the University of Milan, Italy, researchers gave 227 people either a placebo or ginseng (100 mg a day). After four weeks, everyone got a flu shot. Over the next eight weeks, 42 people in the placebo group developed an upper respiratory infection, but in the ginseng group, only 15 did, a significant difference. If you’d like to try ginseng, take it for a month before getting your flu shot.

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