Cold And Flu, Recognition And Prevention

[Background music] >> If I were somebody who came down quite suddenly with what feels like severe chills, body aches, a headache, a nice rip roaring fever, something generally over a 101 degrees. I have a cough, sometimes a sore throat; I may or may not have gut symptoms most likely not gut symptoms because flu is a respiratory illness. That's flu. A cold has sort of a little more gradual onset. It's a little more insidious. It usually isn't accompanied by massive headache unless you have something like a sinus infection on top of that in which case your sinus headaches may be here or behind your eyes or over your teeth. Sometimes you know a little band around here, and colds generally are milder. So they take a little bit longer to come up, they're generally not accompanied by a high fever and they're milder -- you don't feel body aches; you don't feel like you have to be in bed for 48 hours or something like that. [ Music ] >> I like to tell people, "Please wash your hands." Because if I did [noise] and wanted to shake your hand, wouldn't you be like totally grossed out? Yeah, so realistically you want to be washing your hands like crazy because these -- these hands -- if you've -- if you've touched objects that are not clean, you can touch other portals of entry like your eyes, or your nose, or your mouth, and you can become infected with a cold or a flu virus. The other thing that you need to do is if somebody is coughing, they need to practice good respiratory hygiene which means they need to cough into a Kleenex and then wash their hands after that or they need to cough into their elbow so that they don't be -- they aren't spewing germs out towards other people. And so there's some things that you can do which is to remain healthy. Get enough sleep which never happens on this campus, eat properly, drink plenty of fluids. I like to tell people to think about taking a vitamin D supplement, okay and then wash your hands and practice good respiratory hygiene. Stay not stressed, that's another good one. Nobody ever does that [background chuckle]. [Silence] In your population age group, it's actually quite effective, but it's also effective in the context. It's -- you're all in really, really large group settings and so the risk of transmission is really, really high. Airborne as well as touch, okay and so you guys sit close to each other, you know. It's for the people who've gotten flu shots, we've done some sort of semi -- semi loose studies to see, "Well out of the people who caught flu, how many of them actually got a flu shot?" Last year didn't count because the flu shots didn't come out until after everybody got the flu, but in years previously we found that there are more people who got flu that didn't get the flu shot than the people who got the flu shot. You know again flu shots aren't 100% effective but they're effective in your age group.