All About Viruses and Bacteria

How you can Prevent Sickness

How to Wash Your Hands
It is important to try and prevent sicknesses in your school, work, and home, but what are the best things you can do to stay healthy?  Here are some key things to keep you and the people around you healthy.

   - Visit the doctor for check-ups often. If you can catch a sickness before it happens or right at its start you can treat it early on and stop it in its tracks.

   - Eating healthy and sleeping well will help strengthen your immune system. With a strengthened immune system you can fight off infections more easily than with a weakened one.

   - Drink and eat enough every day. If you don't eat and drink your body will have no energy. If you have no energy you won't be able to fight a sickness if you get one.

   - Exercise to keep your body in shape and healthy. If your body is used to being active it will be easier to fight of a sickness and recover form it.

   - Don't share food or drink items with other people. Even if someone does not look sick they could carrying a virus and not have symptoms. Anything you touch when sick will then have germs on it.

   - If someone is sick stay away from them. It won't help them if you just get sick too. Recklessly exposing yourself to germs is always a bad idea.

   - Wash your hands often, it can never hurt. After you go to the bathroom, between classes, before and after lunch, anytime is a good time to wash them.

   - Use hand sanitizer to clean your hands. If there is no way to wash your hands use hand sanitizer. It can kill up to 99.9% of germs on your hands. Don't wipe off the hand sanitizer before it dries though. That is part of the germ killing process.

   - Stay home if you do get sick. You don't want to spread what you've got to everyone else.

   - Cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze. Don't do it into your hands because then the germs you cough into them will be spread to everything you touch. Cough into your elbow or a tissue.

   - Discard any used tissues. Don't leave them lying around. They could spread germs to your family, friends, teachers, or anyone else you come in contact with.

   - After someone is sick clean your house to help stop the rest of your family from getting sick. Wash bedding and clothes; wipe down common objects like TV remotes, computer mousses, phones, and video game controllers. Wash door handles toys to keep kids from getting sick. Wash down the bathroom good, there is no way a sick person can avoid using the bathroom.

   - Cleaning tools like sponges and rags can actually harbor germs wash rags and replace sponges frequently to avoid spreading germs rather than eliminating them.

   - Close the toilet lid when you flush. The sudden rush of water caused when the toilet flushes sends droplet every where in the bathroom. Would you want those germs in the air or even on your tooth brush?

   - Open the window or turn on the fan in the shower. All that moisture provides the perfect environment for who knows what to grow in your house or home.

   - Know the facts about the flu. Once you know what it is and how it infects you then you, you can avoid those ways it makes you sick.

   - Don't touch your eyes nose or mouth, if you don't touch these key areas viruses need to spread then you will greatly reduce the chances of getting sick.

   - After washing your hands in the bathroom don't touch door handles or sink handles. People who have not yet or do not wash their hands at all touch these things. If you touch them you will be getting the same germs you just washed away.

   - Get vaccinated. If you get a vaccine your body can create antibodies with out ever getting sick. The when you do get sick, you can fight it off very easily.