How to Keep Your Child Safe from Cold and Flu

How to Keep Your Child Safe from Cold and Flu

Parents hate it when their children get sick. The children become cranky, weak and sad. They miss out on important things such as school, time with family and other social obligations. As a parent, you get worried and have to interrupt your normal day to take care of your child’s needs. It is, therefore, much better to make sure that your children are protected from this unfortunate situation. Here are a few tips on how to keep them safe from colds and flu.

Keep Your Hands Clean

One of the most effective ways of keeping your children and family members safe from flu and cold viruses is to ensure that they always keep their hands clean. It is important that you teach your children, from a very early age, how to properly wash their hands.

Washing hands is not just a matter of getting your hands wet. Use warm water and soap to gently, but thoroughly scrub the palm, between the fingers, back of the hand and even under the nails for approximately 20 seconds.  A fun way of helping your children remember, how to wash hands effectively, is by making them sing “Happy Birthday” twice while they scrub their hands before rinsing.

Make sure that they know they need to wash their hands before eating, after using the loo, after handling dirt or pets and after coughing. Your child’s care givers and sitters also need to be taught that they need to keep their hands clean too, for the child’s sake.

Disinfect Your Child’s Environment

Children can be all over the place. They love to explore their environment and can be quite efficiant at it, too. A child can touch an excess of 300 surfaces in a mere 30 minutes. If one of these has germs, it means that they can very easily spread these germs all over the house in a very short time. It is important to make sure that their environment is as germ free as possible.

A very effective way of doing so is using disinfectant spray right after you have cleaned your house. Spray makes it easier to reach those hard to reach surfaces. A cheaper alternative is to use a bleach solution mixed with water. For those keen on natural alternatives, you can use vinegar, borax or tree tea oil.

Make sure you disinfect all those surfaces that are commonly touched like doorknobs, light switches, and telephone mouthpieces. Also, ensure that your dishes are properly washed with soap and water too. Do not share spoons, forks and knives without washing them first.

Avoid Exposure

Before you let your child travel or visit friends or relatives, find out whether where they are going is healthy. If they are having friends over, or travelling to a friend’s house for a playdate, try your best to find out if the children they will make contact with are not suffering from colds, flu and other communicable diseases. If your child is ill, don’t let them expose friends to germs. Keep them at home with proper rest and medication until they become better.

Healthy Habits for Healthy Lives

Generally, a healthy child will be less likely to fall ill from any kind of sickness. It is important that you introduce healthy habits for children in your home as early as possible. From teaching your children how to keep clean, getting the right kind of exercise, eating right to getting enough sleep. If your child is young, please make sure that you breast feed them for as long as possible. By doing these things, you build your child’s immune system, making them naturally able to fight off disease.

Visit Your Doctor

If your child gets sick, please make sure that you visit the doctor. It is easy to think that you can self-prescribe medication for your child, however do not do so. For children, if symptoms persist, please do not hesitate to rush them to a trusted pediatrician. They are more sensitive to illness and, as a result, need better care and monitoring.

Who let the dogs out ? The medical laboratory, that's who !

Dogs have an olfactory capacity that is more than 100 times that of humans, and that stool from patients with Clostridium difficile infection has a unique odor due to P-cresol, a phenolic compound fermented by the bacteria.

Some nurses, laboratory technicians, and physicians have been able to make a diagnosis of C. difficile infection on the basis of this odor.

The study by physicians in The Netherlands used a Beagle dog trained to recognize the unique odor of stool containing C. difficile toxin. Testing of stool samples showed recognition of positive tests in 30/30 (100% sensitivity) and negative tests in 270/270 (100% specificity).

These results are superior to all existing tests for C. difficile infection.

Comments: We NEVER get a screening test with 100 % sensitivity & 100 % specificity, so if we can train dogs right, this is the way to go!!

Honey as a Cough Suppressant in Children: Does It Work?

Effect of Honey on Nocturnal Cough and Sleep Quality: A Double-Blind, Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Study

Cohen HA, Rozen J, Kristal H, et al

Pediatrics. 2012;130:465-471

Honey as a Cough Suppressant

The use of over-the-counter (OTC) cough and cold medications is discouraged by professional societies and the US Food and Drug Administration. Home remedies, such as honey, are inexpensive and could be safe alternatives for the treatment of cough. Cohen and colleagues conducted a trial in Israel, enrolling children at 6 community clinics during 2009. The goal of this study was to compare the effects of a single nocturnal dose of 1 of 3 different honey products, with placebo, on overnight cough and sleep symptoms for children with upper respiratory infections.

Study Summary

The children in the study were 1-5 years old and had what was believed to be an uncomplicated upper respiratory infection. Children with asthma, pneumonia, sinusitis, or allergic rhinitis were excluded from the study. Outcomes were measured with pre- and postintervention questionnaires containing 5 items that assessed the child's cough and degree of sleep difficulty the night before and the night of the intervention. Children were enrolled if their scores on the preintervention questionnaire were of sufficient severity.

The 3 different honey treatments included eucalyptus honey, labiatae honey, and citrus honey. The placebo compound was made from dates, and it was also brown and sweet. On the night of the intervention, parents gave 10 g of the allocated compound 30 minutes before the children went to sleep. On the next day, study personnel contacted the family by telephone to complete the postintervention questionnaire. Parents were asked about the following:

• Frequency of nocturnal cough the previous night;
• Severity of the cough;
• How bothersome the cough was;
• The degree to which the cough affected the child's sleep; and
• The degree to which the cough affected the parents' sleep.

The primary outcome was the change in the frequency of the nocturnal cough from pre- to postintervention assessments. The study enrolled 300 children with upper respiratory infections, and 89.7% completed the protocol. The median age of the children was 29 months, and 54% were boys. For most of the assessment items, there were no differences among the 3 different honey extracts. Each of the honey extracts improved symptoms compared with the placebo extract. Cohen and colleagues concluded that honey given at bedtime was more effective than placebo in reducing the frequency and severity of nighttime cough. They suggest that honey could be used as a safe and effective cough suppressant for children 1 year of age and older.

Viewpoint

Honey has many potential medicinal benefits, including antioxidant activity. Histograms created by the investigators show that the postintervention scores were lower for every group, suggesting a potential benefit of just being in the study, or a temporal improvement of symptoms. However, improvement was universally much greater for the honey extracts, by as much as 20%, compared with the placebo extract. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) does not recommend honey for patients younger than 1 year of age because of the potential risk for botulism. The AAP has produced a handout that can be shared with families, and that details several safe alternatives for alleviating cold symptoms in children, including honey. When considering the relatively low cost of honey (compared with OTC cough and cold medications) and concerns over the vasoactive agents in OTC cough and cold preparations, honey sure seems to be an attractive option.

Source

Abstract