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Hygiene: Tips on Preventing Colds and Flu

Taking responsibility for your own well-being is a main tenet of the holistic approach to good health. Many prevention techniques come down to using common sense about your health.

1. Wash your hands.
Wash your hands often during the day, preferably with a disinfectant, antibacterial soap. Wash more frequently if you’re around sick people.

2. Don’t cover your sneezes and coughs with your hands.
Because the germs and viruses cling to your bare hands, muffling coughs and sneezes with your hands results in passing along your germs to others. When you feel a sneeze or cough coming on, turn your head away or look down while you’re expelling your germs into the air. If you find you’re instinctively covering up anyway, use a tissue and dispose of it immediately, then wash your hands.

3. Get rid of your cloth handkerchiefs
Cotton handkerchiefs may be a time-honored family tradition, but using them is a sure way to launch your own personal cold and flu season. Switch to paper facial tissues instead, and throw them away immediately after using. Be sure to wash your hands once you’ve blown your nose.


4. Don’t touch your face
Cold and flu viruses enter your body through the eyes, nose, or mouth. Touching their faces with germ-laden hands is the major way children catch colds and flu. All the while mistakenly believing they don’t touch their faces, adults travel the same avenue of contagion.

5. Use disinfectants at home and work
Regularly wipe down household and office objects that are frequently touched – telephones, remote control, switches, desk or kitchen implements- or those you may be sharing with a cold-or flu-ridden friend or relative. Remember that you’re not just cleaning up after others. You can re-infect yourself with your own germs that are left around the house or office.

6. Use paper cups in the bathroom
Splurge especially during cold and flu season, and buy a supply of paper cups for the bathroom. Viruses thrive in the bathroom, living for hours or longer on glassware, toothbrushes and even towels.

7. Don’t share your toothbrush
It’s even a good idea to throw out your toothbrush when your cold or flu is over so that you don’t re-infect yourself.

8. Change towels often when there’s a cold or flu in the house
Just like toothbrushes, towels and washcloths – especially when damp – harbor live viruses. When you wash soiled cloth towels, use a hot water to wash or one that contains bleach to wash away all of the germs.

9. Keep the sick room healthy.
- Change and wash bed linens and bed clothes once a day.
- Air out the room by opening doors and windows periodically.
- Rinse oral or anal thermometers in rubbing alcohol after each use.
- Wipe with disinfectant all lamp and light switches, telephones, remote controls, or anything else the sick person or visitors might touch.
- Empty wastebaskets.

10. Humidify your surroundings.
The importance of moisture is often underrated as a cold and flu-fighting tool. Adequate moisture is essential for the proper functioning of mucous membranes, which are the front doors of your upper respiratory system.

11. Drink plenty of fluids.
If you want to stay healthy, drink plenty of fluids every day. Water flushes your system, washing out the poisons as it rehydrates you.

12. Use a saline nasal spray.
If you can’t affect the humidity around you, affect the moisture level inside your head. Buy a simple, non-medicine saline nasal spray and use it several times a day, or whenever your nasal passages feel irritated and dried out. This device flushes cold, flu, and dust particles from your nose, while it keeps the mucous membranes moist.

13. Breathe through your nose, not your mouth.
Breathing through your mouth dries out the mucous membranes in your throat, a line of cold and flu protection you want to have in top working condition.

14. Dab un-medicated petroleum jelly in each nostril.
This is an inexpensive effective antidote to dry nasal passages. Using a dab of petroleum jelly in the morning and again before bedtime will help keep your mucous membranes in fighting shape and that, in return, will help repel cold and flu viruses looking for a susceptible host.

15. Take a sauna.
By indulging in a sauna twice a week, you may be able to reduce your susceptibility to colds by up to 50 percent.

16. Get fresh air.
A regular dose of fresh air – to help purge you of any airborne cold or flu viruses- is important, especially in cold weather when central heating dries you out and makes you more vulnerable to cold and flu viruses. By opening windows and doors for a few minutes and circulating fresh air in a room in cold weather, you can help push out air-borne viruses. In summer, fresh air may help to reintroduce humidity into a room that air-conditioning has dried out.

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