A little knowledge can keep your family safe.
Whether at home or in a public place, there’s a chance you or your family members will encounter bad bacteria. While everyone won’t get sick, it’s best to know how to keep your family protected.
Guard Against Infections at School
Kids often share more than just their lunches during the day. They also typically pass germs around the classroom. There are some things they can do to decrease the risk.
Susan Rehm, MD, who treats infectious diseases, says it’s easy for germs to spread in a classroom setting.
“Children are not necessarily consistent with their use of tissues,” Rehm says. “They may not cover their cough, and they tend to share whatever they have with the people around them. So daycare and school situations are ideal for the spread of respiratory virus.”
So what can parents do to help keep kids from spreading germs at school?
Rehm recommends that parents teach their kids to:
• Wash their hands. Kids should wash their hands before and after they eat and after using the restroom.
• Keep sanitizer in their desks or book bags. To be effective, sanitizer should be 60 percent alcohol.
• Wipe down their desk with anti-bacterial wipes. Create a habit for kids to wipe their desks at the beginning and end of each school day.
• Cover their coughs and sneezes. Teach them to cough and sneeze into their elbows rather than their hands to decrease the spread of germs to others. Also, you can teach them that tissue is most effective, but if they can’t reach for a tissue in time, their elbow is okay to use.
“The cough-covering maneuver (coughing or sneezing into the elbow) I’ve heard referred to as the ‘Dracula move,’” Rehm says. “Kids have picked up on that, I think, extraordinarily well.”
Whooping Cough
Contrary to popular belief, pertussis, or whooping cough, affects both children and adults. It’s a highly contagious respiratory tract infection that has made somewhat of a comeback in the U.S. over the last couple of years.
“It often begins with lots of congestion and phlegm,” says Dr. Johanna Goldfarb, who specializes in pediatric infectious disease at Cleveland Clinic. “And it’s a cough that just doesn’t seem to go away.”
Goldfarb says that any bout with whooping cough is usually prolonged. It can begin with a runny nose, congestion and sneezing, but the symptoms will worsen over time.
In school-aged children and adults, whooping cough can cause a lack of oxygen to the brain or even seizures, but it’s rare.
The bigger concern is when a newborn contracts the infection.
“When an infant in the first months of life gets whooping cough, it’s life-threatening,” Goldfarb says.
Meningitis
Anyone with a college-bound daughter or son — especially if they’re staying in the dorms — needs to be up to speed on bacterial meningitis, a serious infection of the brain and nervous system.
This preventable illness can affect students living in close quarters and is spread through intimate actions, like kissing, but alarmingly, even a shared drink or sip from an infected person’s bottle of water can spread the bacteria.
Infections can also become serious very quickly, even when treated with antibiotics.
There is a vaccination, which protects your teen from one of the most common forms of bacterial meningitis. Specifically, teens (or anyone under age 55) who need a vaccine will receive the meningococcal conjugate vaccine (MCV4).
Article courtesy of Cleveland Clinic News Service. For more information, visit health.clevelandclinic.org.
