When I crawled back from my general practicioner’s office this afternoon, where I’d been to get my “unfit to work” certificate (for a really bad cold) I wondered: the good doctor was the picture of good health while judging from some few people I know colds/flu was making the rounds this week, and judging from some people in the waiting room the doctor was seeing a steady stream of virus motherships (like me). He even gave me his hand by way of goodbye.
It seems to me that if people like him would be as susceptible to common infections as people like me are he’d be laid low for a significant part of the year. (Well of course he had his flu shot. So had I.)
So, are people who are in frequent contact with the sniveling masses in less danger of being infected? Perhaps because their immune system is getting a good workout my meeting new pathogens all the time? This would probably then apply also to some other jobs, like taxi drivers.
Earlier this month I had a nasty cold turn into bronchitis. When I finally relented & went to my GP, she told me she had just gotten over the same thing I had. So, no, I don’t think there is a special “health care professionals immunity”.
If your doctor is smart, he/she will wash his/her hands between every patient, and not touch his/her face (lips, nose, eyes) with unwashed hands. That, and the use of gloves when seeing patients, and basic good health practices (enough sleep, good nutrition, regular exercise, etc.) should be enough to prevent a health care worker from getting whatever every patient has. But sometimes it’s going to be their turn, too.
My dad’s a doc, and he is meticulous about washing his hands after seeing patients and upon leaving the office. Not just a little soap and water, either. I’m talking scrubbing for minutes at a time with surgical soap.
He has always had a good immune system, so he’s able to ward off the colds and flus, but when he gets sick, he is out.
built up over time. I used to work for many years in a hospital and new hires were out with every cold that came around but those of us who had been there a while would rarely sucumb. My wife is a teacher and the same thing occurs. New teachers get every bug that is around and my wife just keeps going. That was until last year when she changed building, across the district, and she was sick about four times. I think the bugs have some, almost, neighborhood similiarity and we get immune to the ones we are exposed to the most. Travlers often report the same thing "I never get a cold at home, but when I go away I always come home with one.
I’m no doctor, but I do work in a medical lab. We share space (and biohazard trash cans) with our infectious disease lab, which means, theoretically, that every time we throw something in a can the ID people have been using, herpes or respiratory viruses or chicken pox or whatnot could spray out. Of course, we have all kinds of safety precautions to prevent that type of thing, but still. Anyway, the point is that since I started working there nearly two years ago, I’ve been sick for a total of maybe a day and a half. I used to get two or three colds a year, at least. Now, no more. So maybe I have built up some immunities. It’s hard to say for sure, of course.
Acc. to James Herriott, the vet author, the healthiest kids in the district were the knacker’s kids. The “knacker” was the dude who picked up the carcasses of dead animals. Said they ran barefoot amongst the tuberculin carcasses…