CB, re what can we do? Personally. I'm not convinced about the disease spreading ability of hot air hand dryers. The air from them is really hot, as you will find by putting a dry hand under them for not very long.
The evaporation process stops hands cooking until hands are dry as the latent heat of vaporisation of water absorbs the energy until there's no water left.
I think that by drying hands properly and until the air is too hot to keep hands in the air stream, there aren't going to be any bugs left on the hot dry hands. They'll be cooked. Unlike the hands, bugs don't have a blood stream to conduct excess heat away to prevent their skin cooking. The bugs fry in an instant with nowhere for the heat to go except into cooking their micro bodies and good riddance to them.
Most people [men anyway, as I am frequently removed from women's toilets by big, aggressive, uniformed, men when I try to conduct investigations into women's hand drying habits] become impatient after a short time drying their hands with hot air and walk out, undried, but having blown hordes of bugs into the water on their skin [not all the air goes through the dryer, so not all bugs are killed by the hot air - some get dragged along on the edge of the airstream, so don't get all that hot before hitting the wet hand].
Those who fail to dry their hands in the approved sars-free fashion are, I suspect, worried that an alarm will go off if they walk out without washing their hands, so they give a kind of peremptory rinse and nominal dry. They can report to their wives that of course they washed their hands, while maintaining a fair degree of honesty.
Apart from that, I'm not sure about how to prepare for Round 2 of sars.
I'm wondering whether I in fact did indeed get a mild case of sars. Unusually, I did get a temperature and did have a chain of contacts leading back to Hong Kong in the previous week or three. I would feel so smug if I'm a sars survivor.
Since the sars bug in Vancouver is so unfatal, it's probably a good idea to get some of those bugs, make up homeopathic amounts of them by dilution, and innoculate oneself with maybe 2 viruses, which, by the time they double, double, double and double to megabillions of them, your immune system will have kicked in and will be killing them off and recording their names for future reference in your immune system's little black book of badly behaving antigens.
Then, when the cofactors kick in and the next round of wild sars arrives, your immune system will see the bugs, check the black book, see they are not welcome and kill them off before they get to multiply and do more than give you a mild case of the sniffles.
Each summer, innoculate yourself against whatever new mutations are on the ran-tan, so that when winter comes, you are primed, ready and waiting for them and their cofactors.
Hey presto, no worry about sars and very few people die.
Doctors aren't used to thinking like this, so they'll say it's not the way they do it. They'll continue, as usual, to misdiagnose things as being the most common ailments, until it's too late and there's damage done. That's why the sars bug in Vancouver is said to be not sars. Although it appears certain and obvious that it is. The doctors refer to the symptoms as being the disease, rather than the primary causal agent.
The next thing to do is avoid risky stuff such as kissing aunt Freda when she comes back from Hong Kong, or anywhere. Don't hongi people [nose pressing and breath mingling as per some Maori habits] but instead bow at a distance while keeping mouth shut and not inhaling. Don't eat at restaurants. Eat very hot food. Eat alone, not at a table with others saying "potato", "pumpkin", "peas", over your food.
Mqurice |
