Vital Steps to Common Cold Prevention

Why you should be practicing common cold prevention:

The common cold is likely to strike children three to eight times per annum and adults about two to four times per year. Notable for putting someone out of commission for seven days on average, this virus may last for as long as full two weeks.

Symptoms of the common cold can manifest within only a few hours of infection and generally last for the entire length of the cold. Tell-tale signs include a runny nose, scratchy throat, sneezes, coughs and other ailments. All this ensuring the time spent in bed will be accompanied with a general feeling of frustration and unpleasantness.

Children and senior citizens are even more at risk than a healthy adult, the symptoms can even cause serious short term and in some cases long-term difficulties. Thus it is essential to practice common cold prevention. And none of this even takes into account the bug’s effect on a person’s professional and social life.

Yet even if we are ready to make a sincere effort to stop this virus from infecting ourselves and our loved ones, there are many misconceptions on coping about treating and preventing the common cold that most people do not even know how to begin.

How to stop a common cold? Here is some of the more basic, yet effective, steps in common cold prevention.

Wash those hands. This above all will help keep germs out of the body. Inserting hands and fingers into the mouth, nose, or eyes is one sure way of transfering germs. Always wash hands before and after handling food. It might even be a good idea to wash hands after social occasions where there is a lot of hand shaking. Anytime you have contact of any kind with people who have a cold, it is wise to wash hands before using them to eat.

This is not because these sufferers have sneezed or coughed all over the place. The common cold isn’t passed easily through the air and breathed in, so there is not that much of a cause for alarm if someone close to you sneezes (unless of course that sneeze was aimed directly at the face). Hand contact is a more effective way to pass on this virus.

In spite of that, the possibility of someone with a cold touching you is not what you need to be concerned about either, as that is often easily avoided. Instead, what you need to be concerned with is what else that person has touched: the doorknob, the desk, that file you’ve been working on for the last hour – as it is likely those objects are full of germs that are simply waiting to pounce.

By touching those items and bringing the hands up to rub the eyes or scratch the nose, you are leaving yourself exposed to infection. But as it is virtually impossible to avoid something the infected has handled, the more logical solution is to engage in some frequent hand washes. It can be a wise decision to keep hands off the face, also. (Frequently touching the face can also cause other problems such as acne.)

Hand sanitizer, handkerchiefs, disinfectant, tissues, etc:

One more great idea is to take advantage of some of the tools available to prevent common colds, hand sanitizers that you can carry around with you are great, especially where water is not available. Disinfectants, though not as frequently available for social occasions are quite necessary in keeping kitchens and bathrooms germ free. Facial tissues are vital and preferred over handkerchiefs, but when on a trip to place where tissues are not readilly available a kerchief may do. Read on…

Vital Steps To Common Cold Prevention, Part Two >>