Whose Snot is it, Anyway?

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Way back in the dark ages, the great minds were convinced that you caught cold by being cold. We still have a few people out there who believe that (see: Mothers-in-law).

Then folks like Pasteur and Hooke and Jenner and Lister came around and invented the Germ Theory of Disease. It goes like this: your kid has a germ, he coughs on you, you get the germ, everyone gets sick.

A great guy named Koch stood on the shoulders of these previously mentioned giants and developed Koch’s Postulates (click here if you are so intrigued that you need to rush to Wikipedia), still used to determine whether a disease is infectious or not (you laugh, but it isn’t always that obvious. In the early days of AIDS, some people were sure it was amyl nitrate, not a bug).

{BTW: “If I have seen further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants,” is an uncharacteristically modest quote from a characteristically arrogant Isaac Newton. But it was written in a letter to Robert Hooke, his archrival and, it is said, a height-challenged man. Just FYI.}

Thanks to Koch’s methods, we now know that colds are caused by itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny things called viruses, which may or may not be yellow polka dotted, because we can only see them with electron microscopes, which only register in shades of electron hits.

So, when I woke up with a sore throat, the first thing I wanted to know was: which one of my ungrateful snots gave it to me?

I really don’t understand what it is about boys and washing their hands. It may or may not be gender specific—since I only have boys, I have no way of knowing. I do remember that first day on surgery in medical school, when they taught us to wash our hands (Scrubbing, for dummies). The women in our class seemed to get it right away. The guys stood there with deer-in-the-headlights looks (Soap? Water? What are these things you speak of?).

I chalk it up to male anatomy. Their little pea brains think that, since they don’t have to wipe anything, they never actually get their hands dirty, right?

Kids never wash their hands. But, when they catch colds, we tell them to use a tissue to wipe their noses, not their sleeves. When they get a cough, we tell them to cover their mouths. See where this is going?

We actually teach them to increase the viral count on their hands exponentially. Then they touch something (worse case scenario—you), and the virus has done its job. It has survived to the next round.

Is there a better solution?

Yes. Strict isolation. Lock them up and slide pizza under their doors until they stop spewing virus all over everything.

Except for school hours. We wouldn’t want them to miss all that great education (let’s face it, if you kept your kids out of school every time they had a cold, the truant officer would be knocking on your door). More importantly, someone gave the virus to your kids—we don’t want them to have the last laugh. Most importantly, if they are coughing all over the kids at school, they aren’t coughing on you.

This time, it seems the only one of my kids that has been hacking recently is the Grouch, and since he won’t let me anywhere near him, generally (too old for that kind of thing), it appears that he transmitted the dread bug while helping me put together the website. Damn.

Send this to the person bothering you today!