It felt like an audition for The Voice
IN MY youth, the medical profession issued a public health mantra: ‘‘Coughs and sneezes spread diseases, keep them in your handkerchief.’’
That simple, virus-fighting verse was hanging in every doctor’s surgery. It was even displayed at our local chippie.
We now know it didn’t go far enough. In the current, corona-infested world, it should have read ‘‘coughs and sneezes spread diseases, keep them inside your own four walls’’.
I have, I’ll admit, a cough and sneezed in my local supermarket. So many heads turned, it felt like an audition for The Voice.
My wife has precious little sympathy.
But I am, she delights to reveal to all and sundry (by phone, obviously), down with man flu – yet again. It is, for sufferers, a disease without immunity.
“You want to try childbirth?” she mocked during last night’s sneezing marathon. I’d prefer a hot toddy.
These are strange, desperate times. Whoever says “one man never changed the whole world” has obviously never tasted undercooked bat.
Not that I’m blaming Ozzy
Osbourne for all this.
How does one differentiate between COVID-19 – a medical term that begs the question, what happened with the other 18? – and the myriad illnesses currently raging through our spluttering country?
That’s the rub. Coronavirus has dominated the headlines, but there’s also Aussie flu, French flu and Japanese flu. Bloody foreigners, coming over here and taking our jabs.
Before the current fixation on all things medical, I was oblivious to the conditions. But regardless of which one infects my body they are all categorised as man flu by my wife.
All of them combined will also be less painful than childbirth, she’ll delight in telling me.
Her last diagnosis of man flu was a sea mile wide of the mark. I’d been bitten by a dog.
Aussie flu, buried by the pandemic, is a new one on Yours Truly. I am unaware of the symptoms, but fear sufferers will be advised to drink plenty of cheap, weak lager.
It may be Kylie contagious.
One 51-year-old has managed to divert the media’s attention away from coronavirus and give coverage to his hell at the hands of Aussie flu.
“I had no energy, wasn’t eating and every muscle hurt,” the patient revealed.
“He wants to try nine hours in labour,” my wife tutted.
“I had a raging temperature and lacked the strength to get out of bed,” he said.
“He wants to try getting up every three hours to bottle feed,” my wife sneered.
The flu victim added: “Regular checks of your temperature is something I was doing throughout the day. This meant I was alternating between paracetamol or Lemsip then ibuprofen.”
My God, he needed Lemsip. This epidemic is more serious than I first thought.
The new illnesses add to a long list that already includes bird flu, Asian flu and Belgian flu – the latter leads to an excess of Flem.
Right now, I’d hate to come down with swine flu. It’s so last season.
The batch of virus invaders underlines the complexity of modern medicine – and the flaws in that 1960s NHS message.
Those sodden handkerchiefs became linen parcels of contagion. They were weapons of germ warfare.
Now, the conditions and remedies have become much more complicated and, in the case of coronavirus, have spawned the most draconian of treatments. Self-isolation.
With Brexit done and dusted, I feel medics should embrace the growing feeling of national pride and christen diseases with more parochial names, names that mean something to our communities. It would make me feel part of the postcode.
I have yet to pinpoint which particular sickly colleagues are suffering from which particular flu, but believe Dave, an IT worker who was, until two weeks ago, based in our newsroom, may have been felled by the Aussie variety.
Yesterday, he sneezed dramatically into his hankie and bellowed: “Strewth, that was a loud one. I’m hotter than a Brisbane barbie.”
Damn the Aussies. They had already given us Kylie and Jason Donovan. Wasn’t that enough?
I am now less baffled by the new strains, thanks to a handy guide to the non-corona global diseases doing the rounds, headlined: “Aussie flu, French flu and Japanese flu: which is worse and what are the differences?”
The Aussie variety – given the name H3N2 by medics, – is by far the worst.
It has claimed 300 lives Down Under, a statistic for a vast continent populated by deadly spiders that lurk under toilet rims that I find comforting.
Many, many more Australians are probably kicked to death by kangaroos or fatally injured by errant boomerangs.
Its Japanese coughing cousin, Yamagata flu, is less severe but more contagious, we’re assured.
The riveting report states: “We have delved into the three flus to separate fact from fiction.”
It later reveals “flu could be cured by having sex as deadly bugs sweep UK” and helpfully explains: “Experts have found sex can increase the amount of the antibody Immunoglobulin A in the body.”
Damn. This illness could be with me for a very long time.