Kids get sick. It’s simply a fact of life. Their immune systems are still developing and they are also just learning how to prevent disease and maintain good hygiene. If you have kids, it is all too likely that you will end up getting sick as well. Sometimes, this can be difficult to prevent.
It’s important to understand that it’s normal for the healthy child to get up to ten colds a year (and usually no less than six, though perhaps you will get lucky). In fact, children make up a good portion of the one billion total colds that are contracted over the course of a year here in the United States alone. It’s not dangerous for a child to have a cold, and it can actually be a good way for their immune systems to develop.
But keeping a cold from spreading throughout the rest of your family is likely also ideal as well. Getting a cold as an adult is also not particularly dangerous – or really dangerous at all, at that – but it can certainly make you feel crummy. A cold can even be bad enough that you have to take off work or keep your kids home from school, which is less than ideal.
Some people don’t have the luxury of having paid days off and must forfeit crucial money that they need for survival when they take time off. And being in school is, of course, crucial to your child’s well being, as they can miss crucial learning moments and information when they miss school too frequently. And even just the common cold is estimated to cause more than twenty two million missed days of schools, as found by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (an organization that is more commonly known as the CDC).
So while the common cold is not threatening to the otherwise healthy person’s health, preventing it is important for many other reasons. Simply hygiene can go a long way to stop the spread of disease and prevent infections. Some people might think that it would be difficult to prevent infections and diseases, but it is actually far from the case. Simply washing your hands often enough is a great way to prevent infections, though it has been found that only about five percent of people actually wash their hands for the recommended fifteen seconds.
Of course, the common cold is not the only thing that needs to be prevented. If your child is involved in sports, you will also need to prevent infections, particularly infections from school sports and MRSA. MRSA can be a scary skin infection, one that can all too quickly spiral out of control if it is not treated promptly.
And MRSA has also become incredibly common, carried by as much as two percent of the entire population of the United States and contracted by more people each and every day. Because MRSA is a staph infection that can be particularly difficult to treat, as it is resistant to many antibiotics, MRSA prevention and efforts to prevent skin infections are critical.
To prevent infections, it is important to first understand how and where they originate. When we look at MRSA and other types of infections, for instance, we find that sports where there is a lot of physical contact have higher rates of such things and a higher need to prevent infections. Such sports often include wrestling as well as the sport of gymnastics, in which very nearly five and a half million people over the age of six participate, making it an incredibly prevalent and popular sport here and all throughout the United States as a whole.
Keeping wrestling mats and gymnastics mats clean is key to prevent infections, and the same should be done to prevent infections anywhere that there is shared equipment. Gyms, for example, should work diligently to prevent infections, as should the owners of any given sports center. The work to prevent infections can be tedious, and it can sometimes feel like fighting a losing battle, but it is an incredibly crucial thing to do.