Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Tips for staying well during holiday travel
Tips for staying well during holiday travel
E ver notice how little kids seem to throw up or get a fever the night before you are supposed to fly home for the holidays?
Even the best of us gets stressed out before the holidays. There is just too much extra stuff to do, from buying presents to cooking massive feasts and untangling holiday lights, on top of your already overworked life. Then, just when you’re at your most overwhelmed, you pack the whole family onto an airplane — where you are trapped with total strangers and all their germs for hours. What could go wrong?
“Holiday travel may lead to increased transmission of infectious diseases due to cooler weather, which results in congregation of people in closed spaces, as well as increased travel and exchange of viruses between communities,” says Darvin Scott Smith, M.D., chief of infectious disease and geographic medicine at Kaiser Permanente Redwood City, Calif. “To minimize the risk of getting, or transmitting, an infection during the holidays, you can take several steps to reduce your chances of suffering or causing others to suffer from an infection.”
On a plane, the stakes are even higher. As Michael Angarone, assistant professor of infectious disease at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine told Prevention, “The air gets filtered out, but you’re sitting with a lot of other people in close proximity. So if the person next to you has a virus and they’re sneezing or coughing, that increases your chances of becoming infected.”
Here are hints that can help you stay well during the end-ofyear sickness season.
Laugh in the face of stress. Remember that the greatest luxury of all is getting to spend time with your loved ones. So if you don’t finish knitting those precious handmade stockings you were prepping for Christmas morning, don’t fret. Ditto on just about everything else you are killing yourself to try to finish. Don’t sweat the small stuff. You don’t need to inject any more cortisol, the stress hormone, into your body. That could lower your immunity to sickness just when you need to be well.
“The increased cortisol level induces likelihood of infection during the holidays,” Dr. Robert Hasty, assistant professor of internal medicine at Nova Southeastern University’s medical school, told CNN.
Of course, you can’t avoid all stress, but you can outwit it a little — by getting more sleep, hydrating and taking stuff off your last-minute plate. Buy presents ahead, pack your bags early and remember to breathe.
Once you are safely on the plane headed to grandma’s house, there are also a few things to keep in mind. Mainly you want to concentrate on germ avoidance. The easiest thing to do is wash your hands. A lot.
There’s nothing better than giving them a good scrub because 70 percent of germs are known to lurk between your fingers and under your nails as Huffington Post noted. Not even antibacterial gel works as well as washing.
You also might want to avoid using your tray table, unless you can rub it down with a disinfectant wipe first, and skip using the blanket they give you (unless it’s still wrapped). You don’t have to be a germaphobe to beware of E. coli and his pals.
Of course, you should think about getting a flu shot, but remember that you may get sick anyway. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cautions, the shot doesn’t protect you from other common respiratory viruses, such as the common cold or rhinoviruses. Also, there are many different kinds of flu out there, not just the kind targeted by the shot.
Dr. Catherine Forest, family medicine physician at Stanford Health Care, also suggests paying attention to how much water you are drinking. She recommends a glass an hour. If you do get sick, she advises taking 1 gram of vitamin C on days 1 and 2, which might help reduce the severity and length of the sickness.
Remember to consume warm beverages, like soup and herbal tea, instead of ice-cold drinks. And of course, get as much sleep as possible.
If you really want to guard against getting sick just in time for holiday travel, why not take the blanket approach and cover all your bases to banish the achoo. Contact Karen D’Souza at kdsouza@bayareanewsgroup.com or 408-271-3772.