The Waterbury Democrat., 1946-11-02
Your Health
By WILLIAM BRADY, N. D.

I was a buck private in the oth- CT war, infantry, 0o division. During October and November up to the armistice we lived exclusively in holes in the ground. Sometimes we would have a day without rain and our leggins would get dry down to halfway between knees and ankles, Temperature was near freezing most of the time. Yet not a man in the company had a cold. Then when the war ended we moved into houses and had truckloads of doughnuts, cho- colate, candy and such stun, all and more than we could eat. Within two weeks nearly everybody had a cold. I didn't stop coughing for several months. Ike's exposure" !" (My Three Years with Eisenhower would seem to have been about the same as any civilian banker experi- ences almost any day in the Fall, winter or spring. (H.M0
 I suppose the richards would dis miss your experience, H. M., with shrug - and the explanation that your resistance" had not been lowered by the wet and cold in the trenches until you got back to nice warm comfortable quarters and close contact with, all the other people there. There is no satisfac- tory answer for that one, because nobody knows what resistance" is, if anything, other than specific im- munity, and of course the old fogies do not mean that.
 The moher of two young school children is active in the Parent Teacher association, and she thinks 1t would be a long step in the pre- vention of contagious disease among the children if they could be iYn- pressed with the importance oi covering mouth and nose with hand kerchief or hand when coughing oI sneezing. This mother is aware that most absence is due to the respira- tory infections-she doesn't so des- cribe them, but she mentions sev- eral, such as measles, whoopine cough, diphtheria, scarlet fever, flu
 Twenty years ago there was a good deal of effort on the part oi health authorities and school teach CTS to impress that very thing upon children - to cover coughs and sneezes always, for any one whc coughs or sneezes without holding handkerchief or hand over mouth and nose is not only impolite but Q menace to people who happen tC be within range of the cough ol sneeze spray, droplets of which even though too fine to see or feel may nevertheless contain the germs or virus of one or another respira- tory infections. Besides the diseases mentioned by the P.T.A. member all spread in the same way, are tuberculosis. pneumonia, smallpox chickenpox, eidemic cerebro-spinal meningitis. infantile paralysis. This is not to imply that these disease do not spread by other routes. but in most cases all of them probably spread most frequently via mouth and nose, cough, sneeze, converse. ton spray-don't take my word fol it. consult any modern textbook oi preventive medicine.
 The best way to teach schoo children-if not their parents-hov three-fourths of all the illness ir the community happens GUS. Pub. lie Health Service survey showed that three-fourths of the illness at. tended by physicians was due to thu Common Respiratory Infections Ger or GIRL, pronounced Kree, fol short)-is by introducing the plar that was successfully followed in ( public school in New Jersey q re- gret I can't find the name of thu school, though I mentioned it a few times in this column). Whenever a pupil-or the teacher-had any sign or symptom of the cri( no mat ter how slight. he or she immediate ly donned 6 mask and wore it con- stantly while in school.