As the Health Reporter for the Mustang Daily I have definitely done my research on H1N1. I have read what the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other authorities say are the symptoms, the most common ways to spread and the most vulnerable populations. The CDC said that the ways to stay healthy are to get vaccinated, cover your nose or mouth when you sneeze or cough, wash your hands with soap and water, avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth and stay home if you get sick.
But I recently was sent a forwarded e-mail that had different ways to prevent H1N1. It suggested the things that we hear all of the time like frequent hand-washing, the “hands-off-face” approach, take vitamin C and drinking as many warm liquids as you can. However, the new things that I haven’t heard before about H1N1 was gargling and cleaning your nostrils out with warm salt water. Now this may sound a little scary but to clean out you nose it say you can also blow really good and then swab your nose with warm salt water.
This makes perfect sense. The entry for H1N1 is our nose and mouth, so if we keep these clean and disinfected we should stay H1N1-free. That seems pretty simple. It says in the e-mail that is takes two to three days for H1N1 to “proliferate and show characteristic symptoms” so if you are doing these things at least once a day then you are sure to kill the H1N1 before you become infected.
My questions is why aren’t they telling this to all Americans? Shouldn’t Cal Poly be telling students to do this?
If preventing H1N1 is this easy why has it been such a problem. Seems to be that the information about home remedies like this one are not widely spread or shared with the public.
Why isn’t the salt water nasal cleansing and gargling included on the CDC H1N1 information page?