Cold and flu germs are airborne…therefore it is easy to catch both. You can wash your hands as much as you wish and hose everything down with lysol…but if you happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time you can still catch the germs, i.e. some douchebag suddenly sneezes near you without covering his mouth.
But it is my understanding that stomach bugs are transferred via fecal matter and vomit and are not airborne. If this is the case, then why are stomach viruses so easy to catch? You would have to kind of go out of your way to come into contact with vomit/poop AND some how get it into your system, right?
Actually, you would be wrong - the toilet is, surprisingly, one of the cleaner areas of the bathroom.
Pathogens that are transmitted by an oral/fecal route are easily transmitted because people don’t wash their goddamn hands properly, or at all. Bonus points if you are in an enclosed environment such as a cruise ship.
This. A million times of this! I can tell ya plenty of stories of how an infection spread due to simple refusal to keep the hands clean(er), and also keeping 'em away from the mouth before cleaning. I’ll even see it in my household as wife and daughter are still not up to ‘acceptable’ in dependability of their handwashings - One of ‘em will get a stomach ‘bug’, a few days later the next one will as well as close friends they were in ‘contact’ with. My reminding them to wash hands gets looks of "Awwww, shut up, ya worrisome ol’ griper! No one here licks their hands, do they?!".
More often than not, I am the one that does not get sick. I do remind them of this near-constantly, but it goes in one ear and out the other, it seems. Washing of hands routinely is a hard habit to develop and maintain, but very much worth the effort it takes. No arguing that point at all
Plus IIRC, cold/flu viruses are spread by droplets, which may mean by sneezing and flying through the air, or by, say, sneezing into your hand and touching a doorknob. The knob is grabbed by some passerby who then wipes his/her eyes, or idly rubs at a corner of the mouth or grabs some food, and presto, infected.
If I’m not mistaken about what “stomach flu” is, my doctor told me recently that it’s often caused by a virus (can be also caused by germs, there are several different diseases commonly called the same by the general public), and that it can in fact be airborne.
That surprised me a lot because like you I assumed it was transmitted only by direct or indirect contact with fecal matters.
I have no cite, but it’s always been my suspicion that a lot of cases of “stomach flu” are actually food-borne illness, and it’s contagious only in the sense that people near each other tend to eat the same things. The rest of the cases are norovirus or something similar – and very few, if any, are actually influenza.
My mom is an RN and used to teach at a nursing school. One of the very first exercises she would do with her students was an “experiment” where she’d spray a UV-reflective liquid on the palms of their hands. She didn’t tell them what it was or what it was for but instructed them to observe hospital procedures as she gave them the tour of the hospital.
At the end of the day, she’d pull out a UV light and show the students where the liquid had gone. A few students who’d stringently observed hospital procedures and washed their hands at each floor or as soon as they used the bathroom were pretty clean. Others, my mom told me, had splotches of color on around their mouths, noses, and eyes, in their hair, on the backs of their pants, at their pockets, on their shoes, and even around their crotches.
Then, she took them back through the hospital and used the UV light to show them everywhere they’d touched - equipment, door handles, autoclaves, clipboards, pens, other people . . . she even found a handprint on one of the newborns. She didn’t even have to explain that if it had been bodily fluids instead of a UV-reflective liquid, they’d have been spreading germs everywhere because . . . by definition, they were spreading germs everywhere.
And these were nursing students, second year, I think. Imagine just how bad non-medical people are compared to that.
I have said this before, and I will say it again here.
If you think you have the flu take this test.
You are sick in bed. You wake up from a fitful sleep, look out the window and see a stack of banded $100 dollars bills, $10,000 in total. Do you:
A) get up and go get the money?
Or
B) Roll over and go back to sleep?
If you answered A you do not have the flu, no matter what you might call it.
go ahead ask me how I know this.
Norovirus is extremely resilient, infectious at very low levels, develops rapidly and vomiting produces aerosols that spread it far and wide.
A family I know boarded a 20 hour flight from London to Sydney. Two hours in, someone several rows back started vomiting. Within 8 hours, people all through the section (including our friends) were being ill, and there was another 10 hours flying time. A miserable time was had by all.
Fecal contamination doesn’t even require toilet flushing aerosol or unwashed hands for transmission. You leave a petri dish out anywhere in a house or store and culture it and you’ll find fecal coliforms on it. Certainly less than on the hands of a person who doesn’t wash well (or on the handles of anything)… but there will still be some.
