In the letter, Chief Glen reminds us that the college is drafting a plan to prepare for an outbreak of the Swine Flu. He offers some prevention advice from the CDC—cover your mouth, wash your hands, stay home if you’re ill—which, he explains, is displayed on posters all over campus.
Then comes the fun part:
we are issuing individual bottles of ‘hand sanitizer’ to each employee as a reminder to wash your hands.I checked my mailbox and, sure enough, it contained a bottle of hand sanitizer.
It would be ridiculous to suppose that one can combat Swine Flu with bottles of hand sanitizer. But it is not ridiculous, I suppose, to offer these tokens as a reminder.
I guess.
I asked one of our scientists if the hand sanitizer works. “Yes,” she said, “but you’ve pretty much got to keep using it every time you touch anything.”
Oh.
Yeah, but it’s a reminder, a reminder to keep washing your hands. As I understand it, you’ve pretty much gotta keep doing that all day to do any good.
Hand-washing. I bet it would be more effective to wear a button that said, “Screw Swine Flu.”
Why always the silly gestures? I don't mean IVC and Swine Flu. I mean us, always, all the time.
“We cut 'em in half with a machine gun and give 'em a Band-Aid.”
10 comments:
Ha.
Just like the Army.
Any action is better than no action, even if it's the wrong action.
Therefore, someday, when someone in charge is looking for someone to blame, they go back to the time or point where something, anything should have been done. Even the wrong thing. And, if it's the wrong thing, then the person doing the wrong thing can say, "Well, we did what we felt was best given the circumstances. We acted according to the limited information we had at the time. It was better than not doing anything at all."
BTW, Biology Lab Professor, Dr. Priest, has quite a lot to say about hand sanitizer. Made sense to me, that is to say, I won't be using it. I will, however, continue to thoroughly wash with hot, soapy water, and refrain from touching things that might receive high traffic touching.
Hot water and soap is best.
The hand sanitizer companies have been making SO much money off this scare and that one - they're sort of like the people who bottle water and then sell it to us.
And we, we buy it even when we don't have money for other things we truly need.
My understanding is that these sanitizers contribute to our egregious overuse of antibiotics and thus hasten the inefficacy of antibiotics and the evolution of super-bugs. Is that right, biologists in the audience?
Plus: all that plastic for the bottles--yikes. Hate to see another contribution to the proliferation of plastic waste.
I do think there could be far better reminders. Well-intentioned, but........
MAH
What don't you people understand? It's a pandaemic!
No feminine hygeine products but plenty of tiny bottles of hand sanitizer.
Who paid for this? That's a lot of little bottles there. I thot we were trying to cut corners and to be more efficient...
You know what it's good for? If you've been drinking and might smell like alcohol, squirt some on yourself and tell everyone that you spilled some hand sanitizer. They'll think they're smelling the stuff you spilled, not the stuff you drank.
(Doesn't fool breathalyzers, though.)
What does it mean" cut corners?"
cut corners: to perform some action in the quickest, easiest, or cheapest way
Wikipedia repeats the advice about hand washing, but ads: "Social distancing is another tactic. It means staying away from other people who might be infected and can include avoiding large gatherings, spreading out a little at work, or perhaps staying home and lying low if an infection is spreading in a community. Public health and other responsible authorities have action plans which may request or require social distancing actions depending on the severity of the outbreak."
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