1st Health Articles

Why should you try to prevent the common cold prevention?

The common cold affects children 3-8 times a year, and strikes adults about 2-4 times per year. Known for putting people out of action for an average of seven days, this virus is also capable of lasting up to two weeks. It’s symptoms, which can manifest within hours of infection, can last for the entire duration of the cold. These tell-tale signs include a sore throat, a runny nose, and a slew of coughs and sneezes among many others, ensuring the time you spend at home will not be pleasant.

That, in a nutshell, is why you should practice common cold prevention. And that’s not even taking into account the bug’s effect on your normal daily life. If only because of these reasons, you should be asking “how is the common cold prevented” instead of wondering why we should even try to prevent it.

Problem is, even if we are prepared to make a sincere effort at preventing the virus from infecting our loved ones and ourselves, there are far too many misconceptions about dealing with the common cold that, quite frankly, most of us don’t even know how to begin.

So how is the common cold prevented? Below are a few of the most basic, yet most effective, steps to common cold prevention.

Washing your hands.

Both common sense and proper hygiene tell you that washing your hands keeps germs away, but you may not know that it’s the actual  washing of the hands,  that serves to remove the cold virus that has somehow found its way onto your palms.
Interesting as it is, though, that piece of trivia doesn’t change the fact that you must wash often to stay virus-free, especially when you’re around people who suffer from or people who have recently suffered from the common cold.

Why is that? It’s not because these sufferers have coughed or sneezed all over the place, if that’s what you’re worried about. The common cold is not easily passed through the air you breathe, so there isn’t much cause for alarm when someone beside you sneezes (unless the sneeze was aimed directly at your face). No, hand contact is a much more likely way of passing on the virus.

Despite that, the possibility of having someone with a cold touch you isn’t what you should be worried about either, since that’s easily avoided. Rather, what you have to worry about is what else that person has touched – the chair, the doorknob, the toilet seat, that book you’ve been reading for the past hour – because it’s likely that those objects are laden with germs that will pass the cold to you.

By coming into contact with them and bringing your hands up to scratch your nose or rub your eyes, you’re already leaving yourself open to infection. But since it’s almost impossible to avoid everything the infected has touched, the most logical solution would  be to employ some frequent hand washing. It’d be a good idea to keep your hands away from your face also.
Tissues, handkerchiefs, hand sanitizers, disinfectant, etc.

Another good idea is to make use of all of the above. Like earlier stated, you really can’t tell how much of your stuff has been exposed to the virus, so using these tools should help a great deal in common cold prevention.