Anyway. Said horrible cold has led me to observe a number of things, which suggest some fatal flaws in the catch it, bin it, wash it approach to keeping diseases at bay...
- As I started sneezing in Sainsbury's on Thursday when all the newswires in the world were going crazy about swine flu , I did try to discreetly sneeze into my shoulder as suggested, as not realising I was going to be so afflicted I'd come out without any tissues. However, this doesn't work when you are overtaken by a series of quickfire sneezes that take you so much by surprise you wouldn't have time to catch them, even if you HAD a tissue about your person...
- Once I had purchased enough tissues, I thought to keep me going till Christmas, I realised how inherently wasteful the catch it system is. You sneeze into a tissue (if gunfire staccato type sneezing allows you time to), throw it in the bin and before you know it you've whipped through yet another pack of Kleenex's finest. It isn't exactly environmentally friendly. Which generally seems to be the case about trying to wage war against microbes. Spouse came back from a scary talk given by a microbiologist some months ago to announce that from now on all his lab coats had to go on a boil wash at least, or we were all going to die from the terrible microbes attached to the fibres of his coats which had come out of his patients' gobs. This doesn't sit very well with our environmentally friendly eco washing machine which suggests we wash everything at 30 degrees... (I do so love it when two mutually exclusive ideas clash).
- Even though I spend most of my time at home, do you know how HARD it is to wash your hands every time you sneeze? Particularly when you are firing rounds of ammunition at a rate of about five sneezes a minute. Sneeze. Check. Catch it. Check. Wash hands. Check. Sneeze again. Check. Caught it. Just. Wash hands. Check. Sneeze. Check. Damned missed it. Shit. Forgot to bin the tissue from first two sneezes. Better do that now. Damn. Sneezed again, and didn't have time to catch it in my tissue, or my sleeve. Now hands, nose, eyes everything dripping. Should I just go and stand under a shower of dettol???
And don't get me even started about how hard it is to maintain at night. I spent the early hours of Tuesday morning sneezing every time I put my head on the pillow. If I'd gone to wash my hands every time I'd done it, I'd have probably created a local water shortage.
Still. It's nice to know in these credit crunch times at least tissue companies are going to be making money. In fact. It might just be worth us all investing the little money we have left in Kleenex...
5 comments:
Shall I put up a big red cross to warn people off???
Kleenex are definitely the place to invest - they were handing out free tissues (including allegedly 'anti-viral' tissues) at Manchester Piccadilly this morning.
I have a healthy respect for pandemics. My great-aunt died in the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19. She was 26 and had been married for six months.
However, as you yourself have pointed out, so far the death toll is far far below those getting killed in car accidents, and I don't see any posters requesting people to stop driving.
About a year ago, I began regularly wiping down the computer keyboard with rubbing alcohol before I use it. I'm given to understand you can pick up more germs at the PC than you can from your toilet. While I'm at it, I wipe the remotes, the telephone, the light switches and the fridge door handle. I may be imagining it, but we seem to be picking up fewer bugs this year...
Having had a little sniffle recently, I agree with you sis. Very wasteful on the paper. And the washing hands too. I am sort of resigned to the fact that if one of us gets it we all get it, and trying to restrict my passing on bugs at work. (Another mutually opposing idea, open plan office spaces and trying to restrict the spread of disease)
I am also with Persephone (& you said in your previous) I respect the pandemic. It might not be this one, or it might be this one resurging in the winter, but it will hit us eventually. We are probably better prepared than we were in the past, but there will be more people seriously ill/ or dying than we are used to. Plus the knock on to work/the economy when we are all off looking after our kids/relatives or sick, does mean life will be severely disrupted when it happens.
I actually think the government are doing a good job on this one, making the right preparations, and giving us the information we need. So I think we need to take it seriously, but not panic in the way the media would like...
Mad Twinx
Having had a little sniffle recently, I agree with you sis. Very wasteful on the paper. And the washing hands too. I am sort of resigned to the fact that if one of us gets it we all get it, and trying to restrict my passing on bugs at work. (Another mutually opposing idea, open plan office spaces and trying to restrict the spread of disease)
I am also with Persephone (& you said in your previous) I respect the pandemic. It might not be this one, or it might be this one resurging in the winter, but it will hit us eventually. We are probably better prepared than we were in the past, but there will be more people seriously ill/ or dying than we are used to. Plus the knock on to work/the economy when we are all off looking after our kids/relatives or sick, does mean life will be severely disrupted when it happens.
I actually think the government are doing a good job on this one, making the right preparations, and giving us the information we need. So I think we need to take it seriously, but not panic in the way the media would like...
Mad Twinx
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