Classrooms are, apparently, critical in helping keep kids, parents, teachers and the community healthy. Kids can come into direct contact with hundreds of different surfaces every day. Any one of those surfaces may have been sprayed with snotty droplets by another cold-carrying child and so spread myriad viruses ready to infect the unprepared.
According to the press release (sponsored by Clorox), a cleaner classroom can be a smarter classroom and having a parent-helper cleaning crew that provides disinfecting wipes, tissues and hand sanitizer, could all contribute to helping keep your school clean year-round. However, far more practical is simply not to send little Johnny or Joanna to school if they are obviously snuffling with the onset of a serious cold, or worse influenza. But, washing hands regularly and well, and using tissues (disposed of sensibly) are certainly a good idea.
Apparently, “Experts believe that up to 80 percent of infectious illnesses are spread by touch and students can touch up to 300 surfaces in just 30 minutes,” sounds reasonable. But, when it comes to airborne viruses that cause colds and flu, surfaces are really not the problem, it’s close contact between an infected and a non-infected individual, touching of hands and the simple acts of breathing, sneezing, and coughing.
As such, one other tip is to do the Elbow Cough: Cough into your elbow, not hands (where you’re more likely to spread germs through touching other people and surfaces. The same applies to sneezing, although it might be called the Shoulder Sneeze instead.
The rest of the tips from the press release boil down to using disinfecting wipes, such as, you guessed it, those made by Clorox and its associates.
SciScoop sibling site Sciencebase has a more academic and practical perspective on how to avoid colds and flu that doesn’t necessarily involve subscribing to the Clorox company take on disinfecting wipes and is purely pragmatic based on medical advice.
No cold medications for under 4 year olds