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Keeping Well in a Sick Winter World

Bodily Fluids and Fecal Matter: It's that time of year when all of us are (should be) super careful about being around people with colds, sore throats and especially the many strains of the flu. But we can easily do our best to prevent colds and flus by doing just a few things, easy things like taking advantage of the cart wipers at the grocery store, moving your seat at the movies if you are sitting by a sick person, wearing a mask on the airplane and at the very least, turning off that air thingy above which loves to circulate the flu bugs from the person in seat 24F to you, in Classic Plus, at 2A. The Classic Plus ticket doesn't know about bugs and does not include invincibility in the price of the ticket.

What are the 10 most germ infested places in public? The University of Arizona, tested over 800 public surfaces in four U.S. cities, and found that one out of every five surfaces in places like shopping centers, offices, day care centers and airports are contaminated.

The number one most contaminated is not surprising  it's playgrounds. Fully 44% of the playground surfaces tested positive for "bodily fluids" which are ominous words indeed. The researchers used markers for protein (fecal matter) hemoglobin (blood), alpha-amylase (mucus, saliva and/or urine) and urea (urine). Just so you know, germs can live on surfaces from a few hours to a few weeks.

Then we have bus rails and armrests. Three is public bathrooms. C'mon now  you can hold it til you get home, can't you? The one exception is perhaps an airplane bathroom. It's really gross to use the airplane bathroom  for many reasons - so if you can, just wait. If you can't wait, then after you do your business, as you are standing at the tiny sink, plunk your legs far apart for balance, pray that you don't hit turbulence, and sing Mary Had a Little Lamb while you wash your hands. Then dry them and use the paper towel to slide the door open.

Four is shopping cart handles. Then Escalator handrails. This one is hard. How are you supposed to wrestle your roll-on suitcase up to check in at Frontier without hanging on for dear life to the escalator handrails? For an older person, it's certainly a conundrum: Do we not hang on and risk a fall or do we hang on and risk getting sick? I hang on to the handrail, then remind myself quite sternly not to touch my face. I find the nearest bathroom pronto, at which time I wash my germ infested, fecally contaminated hands.>/p>

May I remind you of the drill after you use a public bathroom? Do not touch anything after you wash your hands. Carry your drying towel out of the bathroom with you and dispose of it there, hopefully not the floor.

Sixth in contamination hell is chair arm rests, then vending machine buttons, then shared pens, then public telephones (do they still exist?) and lastly elevator buttons. I can attest that your elbow will make a fine index finger for the elevator button. You will look rather crazy in an ungainly contorted manner, but who cares?

Americans touch about 300 different surfaces every 30 minutes, so it's pretty much impossible to avoid all germs. However, the best defense in the world is (constant) hand washing (or maybe living in a diaper in a purified air bubble like HH). This means before you eat, before you prepare foods and after you come home from shopping or the office or anywhere, "out there," just make a beeline for the washbasin. Teach your children and spouse to diligently wash their hands too. It just takes one person (usually a child who gets the bug at school) to make a whole family sick. I remember that well when my kids were little.

Then make sure you are taking some sort of vitamin C, not a lot is needed, but at least 1,000 mgs. Then the all-important vitamin D: If you don't know your levels, get them done and shoot for somewhere between 60 and 70. Eat a big raw salad every day and drink a smoothie every day. My smoothie contains calcium lactate powder, camu powder, my current protein powder from Thorne, CORE which is a green medley, soaked chia seeds, a couple other things (like Maca powder, turkey tail mushroom ) plus blueberries. And just jam your salad full of lots of different raw veggies - fruits, too. And I make my own dressing of EVOO and lemon plus I might add lots of garlic when I feel like I need it. And, very important, reduce if not eliminate your sugar in the cold months as sugar has been shown to kill WBC's (white blood cells) for up to 4 hours.

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