Volume 17, No. 4, Fall 2009
By George Heufelder, MS, RS, Director,
Barnstable County Department of Health & Environment
Mouth, eyes, nose. If you remember nothing else about this article, remember those three words. Recite them like a mantra during your day.
I admit it, I am a television junkie and a recent show named “Scrubs” provided a very appropriate lesson in this time of H1N1.
It seems there was this incompetent intern leaving the hospital for the last time after making numerous mistakes that nearly killed his patients. As he leaves, he innocently picks up a tissue from the floor and throws it in the trash. Through the marvels of technology, the tissue appears with a fluorescent green glow to indicate the presence of germs. As he throws the tissue away now his hand glows green. He then goes to say goodbye to a favorite patient who’s just overcoming an infection. They shake hands, and, you guessed it, her hand glows green. Next, she puts both hands over her face and mouth and now the germ glow transfers to her mouth and slowly radiates throughout her body. The final scene shows an empty bed and leaves the rest to the viewers’ imagination.
If all germs were really bright fluorescent green, we would get the picture.
Now I don‘t want to re-write the oft-repeated message about washing our hands to avoid transmitting influenza, but there is an equally important message that often gets forgotten–keep your hands away from your mouth, eyes, and nose. They are the primary routes to viral infections like H1N1.
Now, take my daily routine, which I consider to be quite typical. I start at the local diner for coffee, the morning paper, and off to work. Although I keep a sanitizer in my truck, the door handle to the diner has had at least 100 contacts that morning. That’s 100 glowing opportunities. The waitress passes me a cup of coffee. Is her hand glowing? The cup reaches my lips a dozen times before I reach work.
By now you get the point. There are so many surfaces that we touch each day that can pass bacteria and viruses to our hands. We can wash many times a day, but how often between washings do we make contact with the one toxic object that has been touched by a glowing hand?
Thus, in addition to frequent hand washing, it is extremely important to consider that any surface we touch could be contaminated and keep our hands away from the main entry points of influenza virus–the mouth, eyes and nose.
For more information about protective measures for influenza (both seasonal and H1N1), check the websites www.mass.gov/flu and www.cdc.gov/flu/. It’s going to be a long flu season and this year we have two types to deal with.
But, if we keep vigilant and also adhere to the principles of cough etiquette (remember the elbow), we hope you will make it through without getting the flu.