Oh, No! Not another Norovirus thread!!!

[sail7seas]

FIRST thing I do when I return home, return to my cabin on a ship or my room in a hotel is WASH my hands well with plenty of soap and water. Wash, wash, wash........ there is nothing hard to understand about that. There is also nothing new about it.

 

[Hlitner]

Wash wash wash! That is always good advice. DW and I have spent nearly 3 years on cruise ships (as passengers) and have so far (knock on wood) avoided catching the nasty noro bug. We have had more then our share of airborne transmitted ailments on ships including common colds, sore throats, and even the flu. There is no way to avoid these ailments unless you stop breathing in air. But you can do a lot to avoid Noro by washing with soap and water at ever opportunity and avoiding touching your face, mouth, eyes, nose, etc. This is no guarantee, but it sure puts the odds on your side.

 

Hank

[Typhoon1]

Noro threads are good. They help to create awareness of this problem.

 

It is very real, it can happen on your cruise. Take the appropriate precautions.

[SwissMyst]

Test Your Germ Smarts

 

By: Margaret Back

The sunscreen is put away and school is back in swing. After a long, hot summer, cooling weather is a welcome relief but not just for us humanoids. Viruses and bacteria are pretty darn happy as well because they multiply better in colder weather and do not live as long in warm weather. Hence, we all get to look forward to the onslaught of the cold and flu season.

 

Test your germ smarts to see how prepared you are for the battle against colds and flus sweeping through your home, school, or office.

 

1. How many germy surfaces (doorknobs, light switches, shopping-cart handles, counters, toys, keyboards, ATMs, etc) can you touch in one minute?

An often said statistic is 300 in half an hour or ten in one minute. In one minute, you could pick up germs left by others that can get you sick from ten surfaces.

 

2. How often do we wash our hands?

One survey says six times a day. That may be optimistic. Since we are awake approx sixteen hours a day that translates into once every 2.5 hours. Your palms have potentially touched 1500 potentially germy surfaces between washings.

 

3. How long do germs live on hands?

Depending on the germ, anywhere from two to twenty-four hours.

 

4. True or false: getting germs on your hands is how you get sick.

Not unless you have open sores on your hands. Touching your face with your hands and transferring germs to your mouth, nose, eyes, and ears is how germs get inside us and make us sick

5. How many times do we touch our face?

Sixteen times in an hour or once every three minutes.

6. How many times can you cough or sneeze in one hour?

No clear statistics on this, but some suggest up to twenty times an hour or once every three minutes when you are sick. Covering coughs or sneezes with the palm of your hand can infect ten surfaces you touch for every minute until you wash your hands twenty seconds with soap and warm water.

 

7. How many surfaces does an elbow touch in one minute?

Less than five an hour. Elbows are not used to open doors, pick up toys, flick on light switches, turn on faucets, work on keyboards and joysticks, etc. You really have to work at it to touch things with your elbow.

 

If we touch ten potentially germy surfaces in a minute, touch our face once every three minutes, and only wash our hands once every 2.5 hours, we expose ourselves to 1500 surfaces and have touched our face fifty times between washings. Wow, so many opportunities for the germs!

Since washing more often is not always practical and washing hands before we touch our face (approximately every three minutes) is almost impossible, reducing how much you touch your face is the best defense. See the Germ Smarts for Kids with Germy Wormy Germ Stoppers Five list below for great suggestions.

 

If a person coughs or sneezes once every three minutes and uses his/her hands to cover his/her cough and only washes their hands every 2.5 hours, that person has potentially infected 1500 surfaces. Tissues are not always available and we don’t carry sinks in our back pockets so how can we cover without using our hands?

 

Jumping on the cough-and-sneeze-into-your-elbow-or-sleeve bandwagon eliminates infecting all of those surfaces. This concept is slowly replacing the cover your cough with your hands that most of us were taught and is highly recommended by the CDC and most of the medical community.

 

Margaret Back, creator of the Germ Smarts for Kids with Germy Wormy program says “Staying healthy all boils down to two things: don’t get germs and don’t give germs. I created the Germ Smarts for Kids Germ Stoppers Five to help my children remember healthy habits so they don’t get germs and have to admit they help me remember as well.”

 

 

 

Via http://www.divinecaroline.com/22175/104656-test-germ-smarts#ixzz2Gxj1TCxe

[SwissMyst]

Germ Stoppers Five

 

1. If you need to touch your face, the back of the hand is the place.

You don’t touch potentially germy surfaces with the back of your hand, you do it with your palm. Using your palm to touch your face is like creating an autobahn for germs.

 

2. Keep bad germs from getting inside you: no fingers, hands, or things in your mouth, eyes, ears, or nose.

 

Germs are invisible so kids don’t realize that they are giving germs a ride when they put things in their mouth. On the Germ Smart for Kids DVD, germs become visible as glitter glue and show how they can spread.

 

3. Things that touch mouths are not for sharing.

This is a great one-liner to use with kids when they reach for a sibling’s cup or food.

 

4. Make sure you keep your distance when someone is sick: no hugging or kissing until everyone is better.

 

This one is probably the hardest with kids but one of the top reasons moms get sick when their kids get sick (creator of the program included).

 

5. Wash your hands and face with soap and water—sing the ABC song!

On the Germ Smarts DVD, germs come alive as glitter glue. Seeing glitter glue spread to the faces, noses, and mouths of the kids in the video is eye opening and makes the phrase “go wash your hands and face” a lot more meaningful.

 

 

 

Via http://www.divinecaroline.com/22175/104656-test-germ-smarts/2#ixzz2Gxiqt8B9

[SeminoleFan]

Am I the only one freaked out about the bag of food... STORED IN THE BATHROOM? Seriously? :eek:

 

I always thought I was a little germ-o-phobic in that, if I have food in an airport, and bring the (sealed) bag on a visit to the restroom, I'm then too grossed out to consume it, and have to throw the food away. It turns out I'm not too far off the mark, in terms of how to avoid noro! :eek:

 

Interesting, scary article! Thanks for the link.

 

Glad you brought this up; I thought it was pretty gross, too. I've noticed people in my office building bringing food or drink containers into the restroom (probably on their way to or from lunch) and I'm always horrified. Once, I saw someone "wash" their dishes in the bathroom. Gag!

[gentlemancruiser]

Just back from a Cunard cruise that was impacted by noro virus. I've never in my life had so much purell on my hands!!!

For the last part of the cruise it was kind of a funny joke because everyone using any of the elevators became creative with how to push the elevator buttons without touching their fingers to the buttons.

[Boytjie]

Am I the only one freaked out about the bag of food... STORED IN THE BATHROOM? Seriously? :eek:

 

I always thought I was a little germ-o-phobic in that, if I have food in an airport, and bring the (sealed) bag on a visit to the restroom, I'm then too grossed out to consume it, and have to throw the food away. It turns out I'm not too far off the mark, in terms of how to avoid noro! :eek:

 

Interesting, scary article! Thanks for the link.

 

True story: last time we flew I went to the bathroom before our flight boarded and a guy was chewing on his wrap sandwich while busy at the urinal. Ewwww!

 

Who/what raised these people?!

[olycruisecritic]

Sorry but Purell is worthless...insufficient alcohol concentration and even at higher levels alcohol has a very low kill rate on the virus. Washing your hands does better as you are washing the virus off the skin and down the drain....rather than mixing the virus around on your hands thinking you are doing something good. Norovirus is reasonably killed by 50 to 1 bleach to water concentration, but it still takes contact time (meaning bleach on your hands for more than a few seconds), and it's understandably a little hard on the hands. I have always been a careful and educated cruiser, but endured a sudden onset of Norovirus with all the clinical symptoms within 48 hours of disembarking from one of the cited "clean" HAL ships in mid-December. It's as common as the cold, but an uncommon experience as anyone who has been through the experience would probably agree!

[SwissMyst]

Sorry but Purell is worthless...insufficient alcohol concentration and even at higher levels alcohol has a very low kill rate on the virus. Washing your hands does better as you are washing the virus off the skin and down the drain....rather than mixing the virus around on your hands thinking you are doing something good. Norovirus is reasonably killed by 50 to 1 bleach to water concentration, but it still takes contact time (meaning bleach on your hands for more than a few seconds), and it's understandably a little hard on the hands. I have always been a careful and educated cruiser, but endured a sudden onset of Norovirus with all the clinical symptoms within 48 hours of disembarking from one of the cited "clean" HAL ships in mid-December. It's as common as the cold, but an uncommon experience as anyone who has been through the experience would probably agree!

 

Thank you for this emphasis. It can't be mentioned often enough. Cruise passengers need to understand there are really two main bugs to worry about, and each has separate disease mechanisms, preventions and and controls, though hand-washing for sheer physical removal of either of the types o bugs is a critical part of each equation.

 

1. Upper respiratory bugs which get inserted by our own hands into nose, mouth and eyes and alcohol sanitizers can be effective against them. Studies have shown sneezing or being in the room with someone with an URI is the least efficient way of disease transmission. Our fingers themselves provide the most direct and sure route to our own infection.

 

2. Gastro-intestinal bugs need to enter via the mouth to get into the GI tract, usually through contaminated food and/or water, but again food that we ourselve may have contaminated with dirty fingers, and even Purell sanitized fingers. That one is a lot trickier to prevent if someone else has been carelessly pre-contaminating surfaces that we later touch though since it is primarily a GI problem, public bathroom contamination is the most obvious place to be extra vigilant.

 

I too am always uncomfortable when all the emphasis on Purell or even just hand-washing, while overlooking how many times one inadvertently touches one's eyes, mouth or nose. Or mistakenly thinks if they use Purell, they are warding off the GI bugs.

 

More attention to actual contact points would provide far greater prevention, than being just globally afraid of the entire environment.

 

Therefore, you'll see me going down the stairs with my sleeve stretched down over my hand for balance on the stair rail, and using a knuckle to push the elevator buttons and always taking a tissue to turn off the water knobs and open the public rest room door when leaving. Those are now second nature for me on cruise ships..... and airports .... and now just about anywhere out in public.

 

And to keep walking around with that imaginary dog collar cone around my neck keeping those inadvertent hand/eye/mouth/nose lapses at bay. That is when we all run the risk of our own self-innoculation of at least the upper-respiratory bugs. Woof.

 

What is the good news about a norovirus infection? That it apparently gives a little bit of immunity so if you do get one, sign up for another cruise right away so you can take advantage of that noro-free zone your body just earned !