Public Service Announcement: I'm scared

During a brief stint working in public health, part of my regular tasks was to write Public Service Announcements, or PSAs, on topics related to health matters. And when I say “writing PSAs about health matters,” I mean “learning things about illnesses and the human body that have scarred me for life.”

No one likes getting a cold or flu. I get that. We can build up a certain amount of resistance to the viruses by surviving illnesses as children and by being healthy in general, but we really can’t become immune to them. It’s a cruelty of nature.

The best thing we can do is maintain good hygiene habits like washing our hands after being out in public, not touching our face unless with clean hands and thoroughly clean our hands by scrubbing them together under running water, preferably with soap, for at least 20 seconds. And, above all, stay home while you’re sick.

How hard is that?

Apparently, people need to be forced to wash their hands, cough or sneeze only into the crook of their arm and stay cloistered in their home while sick. Also apparently, this kind of force is illegal.

Fun factoids: The average aerosolized droplet of spit or mucus from a cough or sneeze has enough virus particles to infect anyone. We’re not talking about a big wad of easily avoided yuck. I’m talking about one droplet of fine mist so small you might not even feel it touch your skin, but (bam!) you are infected.

The folks at LiveScience.com say that one cough expels about 3,000 spit droplets, which have been clocked spraying through the air at speeds of 50 mph. You can’t run away from that fast enough. As impressive as that sounds, a sneeze beats a cough like Usain Bolt in a foot race against the average 80-year-old. A sneeze creates about 40,000 spit droplets clocked at speeds greater than 200 mph — a speed halfway between a cheetah and a black powder bullet. Good luck.

Scientists agree those viruses can zing about 6 feet through the air and can live for hours, free-roaming through the air or waiting for you on a touchable surface. Under the right conditions, they can live free for three days. Think about that.

You are in a room, everyone looks healthy, and you relax your germ vigilance raise your hand from the armrest of your chair to rub the corner of your eye. Rookie move. You don’t know who was in that room a few hours before you, who wasn’t covering their cough, or who covered their splattering sneeze with their hand, or what surfaces those people touched.

A few days later, you are sick and you don’t even know where that train wreck started.

Here is the simple explanation of how you get a cold or flu illness: You have taken into your body through your mouth, nose or eyes, the infected spit, snot or coughed-up mucus of a sick person.

Yummers. Thank you for sharing.

Despite knowing this, I was only barely more freaked out about viruses than I was before, until, that is, I had to write about norovirus.

Cold and flu are almost the same illness. A few days to a week after getting infected you’re looking at a sore throat, snot, cough, elevated temperature for a cold, maybe a headache. Flu is a little amped up — add probably a higher fever, more aches, maybe nausea, maybe some vomiting, especially if you’re a kid, old person or have a health issue. Whichever illness, you are miserable. You want a comfy blanket, soup and some alone time with a pillow.

Norovirus is another animal altogether, a wild, ruthless animal.

Twelve to 48 hours after being infected with norovirus you get all the classic symptoms of gastroenteritis, or what we usually think of as “stomach flu” or “food poisoning.” It’s awful. It usually lasts 24 to 72 hours. But, wait, there’s more.

After recovery from norovirus, people can still shed the virus for up to two weeks. It can also live out on its own for a couple weeks. To avoid catching it, you need to wash your hands and your raw foods like it’s your profession, clean up surfaces with a bleach solution and wash clothes and bedding on the highest setting possible when caring for an infected person. This is all pretty important.

Norovirus infection takes only about one-tenth the virus particles as cold or flu, 18-100 is all. This is both bad and good news. It’s bad, of course, because it means the disease is highly contagious, but good news because the only way you can get norovirus is by ingesting the virus particles — which can only come from an infected person’s vomit or feces. That’s right. The less you eat of that, the better.

It was at this point in my public health career I became a disease-a-phobe.

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FYI, the health department just issued a PSA about people getting norovirus in surrounding counties, but not at [email protected].