Seasons Sneezes

Ah, autumn. It's a season of colorful leaves, chilly weather, pumpkins, school and, of course, the flu. Depending on the strain, flu season can last anywhere from a couple of months to all year. The H1-N1 virus is a good example of how a flu season can be year-round. While the initial scare has for the most part gone away, the "swine flu" has become an, for the most part, accepted piece of life.

This fall has seen plenty of students out with various illnesses or going home early due to them. Schools, being a routinely used public area, stand a chance of having far more germs floating around than one's home.

"The library probably has more germs than any other place in the school," says Mrs. Reid, one of the librarians in the Sparta High library. "We have around 200 students coming through the library a day, and that's just study halls."

"Another good place for catching illnesses is in the choir and band rooms," says Kelsey Thurston.

No one really knows why the cases of illness seem to spike during the colder months. Perhaps it stems from the fact that, due to the colder, and harsher, weather, people tend to stay in more confined areas. Confined areas tend to become "breeding grounds" for all sorts of oh-so-fun colds and the like, which makes people far more likely to contract a cold in the winter than in the summer.

According to Mrs. Dawn Schmidt, one of the secretaries in the office, it isn't uncommon to have two pages of students calling in sick. (One page is equal to eleven students.)

"Three of the more common strains we see are walking pneumonia, sore throats, and the flu," says Mrs. Swafford. "They're pretty normal, though."

Students are constantly reminded to wash their hands in order to curb the spread of germs. Regular hand washing along with the (sometimes quite liberal) use of hand sanitizers such as Germ-X and Purell have become automatic parts of day-to-day life. The result is a much healthier student body.

Along with proper sanitation, students can slow the spread of germs by coughing into either a tissue or the crook of their elbow. Using Kleenex when you sneeze, or applying hand sanitizer if no tissue could be found in time, is also a good way to slow down the spread of colds and other viruses.

As students begin to integrate more proper sanitation into their daily routines, the number of illnesses contracted during the school year decreases.

"This is the first Monday were we haven't had two complete pages of students who called in sick," Mrs. Dawn Schmidt said on October 11.

With proper sanitation, autumn can be a season of football games instead of head colds. Though illness may always creep up here and there, the risks of being sick as often are drastically reduced. After all, being sick is no fun--especially when there's make up work to be done!