As cold and flu season begins, you can guard against germs

As the days shorten toward winter, sniffles and sore throats return. Noses start dripping, and all too soon you’ve got aches and pains, fever and malaise. And so do your kids, or your colleagues, or your friends.

This is the onset of cold and flu season, when germs travel easily from person to person as we spend more time close together indoors. And everything can be a good breeding ground for germs: computer keyboards, the knob on the door into your office, the telephone you use, the subway seat where someone coughs behind you, the escalator railing, the shopping cart handle.

Germs get spread by hand-to-hand contact, by touching a contaminated surface or by being spewed through the air in droplets as someone sneezes, coughs or talks. On average adults get about two to four colds a year, children about six to 10, mostly in the fall and winter months. And every year 5 to 20 percent of the population comes down with the flu, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with about 200,000 people getting sick enough to be hospitalized.

“The difference between the common cold and flu is the severity of fever,” said Jeff Dimond, a spokesman for the CDC. “The flu is usually accompanied with fever, aches and pains, and congestion in the lungs. A cold is more in your head. Both are contagious,” often before symptoms even show up.

Colds linger for a week to 10 days. The flu is shorter but carries a bigger wallop. It tends to clear up after two to five days, but sufferers may feel drained and exhausted for another week.

Want to avoid all this?

Here are a few simple tips for staying healthy this season from the experts (CDC, doctors, infectious-disease researchers).

The No. 1 preventive measure for killing germs is washing hands, said Dimond.

“If you think about where you put your hands, you wipe your nose then touch the elevator,” Dimond said. “A virus can last for six hours on those elevator buttons. If you have bowls of nuts or M&Ms out and everybody is dipping their hands into it, germs get passed around.”

Not very appetizing? The CDC recommends washing hands, both tops and palms, for about 20 seconds with soap, then rinsing. Wash before eating and preparing food. Wash after using the bathroom, blowing your nose, changing a diaper and caring for a sick person, to name a few common situations.

If washing your hands with soap is not doable, slather on hand sanitizer, Dimond said. “Part of working here at the CDC [in Atlanta], we are highly aware of hand hygiene,” he said. “At every floor there is a hand sanitizer and a big sign at the front door to wash hands.”

Secretions from your nose are often clear in the beginning of a cold and thicken as the cold progresses, said Ann Rixinger, an infectious-disease specialist in Annandale. “But be careful not to wipe your eyes, as germs can go into tear ducts and then get in the lymphatic system,” she said. “We will assume no one picks their nose. For little kids we have to teach good hygiene, using tissues and keep extra containers of Purell around.”