PLEASE don't infect me with your 60mph cough!!

This is a longer blog than I know is ideal, so bear with me!  I have a cold.  I'm assumming I acquired this virus on one of my recent flights (although to be honest, it could have been from any of the numerous people I socialized with or worked with the past week while in Florida or North Carolina).  I'm going to focus on the airplane. 

Have you ever wondered how at risk you are for "catching" a bug when you fly?  A few months ago, I was meeting with a group of people at a hospital in California.  One of them was obviously sick....nasty nasty cough...the kind where you want to get up and move to the opposite end of the room.  Sensing the discomfort of several in the room, one of the physicians (a pulmonologist) gave us a mini-lecture about the germ transmission process specific to respiratory infections.  Some of the info pertained to air travel since he knew I fly quite a bit.

He talked about  a study that was done on aircraft, comparing infection rates when air was exchanged with fresh air vs. planes using re-cycled air.  The study concluded that recycled air didn't result in a higher rate of infection.  They concluded its often the flat surfaces on the planes that infect people. 

Years ago, per the doc, the turnaround for an aircraft (time to unload and reload passengers) was close to 2 hours.  Now the turnaround is often 20-30 minutes which is NOT enough time for the plane to be thoroughly cleaned, or enough time for all the bugs to die...the bugs that are sitting on all the hard surfaces...think armrests, tray tables, the light switch and air control.  So when you board, you're entering a contaminated zone!
How do those bugs get on those hard surfaces?  Two primary ways:
1.  coughs and sneezes
2.  contaminated hands

Coughs and sneezes first.  I assumed that the spray from a cough or a sneeze could travel quite a distance on a plane.  I looked it up (what did we ever do before Google??) and here's what I learned:
-a sneeze may produce 40,000 aerosolized droplets and those droplets travel around 47mph (that's 69 ft/second). 
-a 737 jet (common for American Airlines) has a cabin that is around 12 feet wide and 98 feet long (also Googled).  So, essentially, someone in the back of the plane can sneeze and 2/3 of the passengers are going to be exposed along with all those hard surfaces -  in a single second. Unless they'covered their mouth, of course.

A cough is a little more powerful - 60mph.

Now to the hands - "Cover your mouth when you cough" has been mothers' mantra for decades, which, as it turns out, may be just as bad as not covering your mouth at all.  Instead of flying through the air, those droplets are now on your hands and will contaminate everything you touch unless you immediately wash your hands prior to touching anything.

How do we teach people the safe way to cough?  I have a couple of ideas:
First, as part of the flight attendants' pre-flight safety speech, they could include a demonstration of appropriate cough/sneeze etiquette.  It could come right after they tell you how to unfasten your seatbelt...( "lift the plate on the buckle...") . It would go something like this....." Ladies and gentleman, as part of our mission to keep our passengers healthy, we'd like to demonstrate the proper way to cough.  Failure to follow this procedure may result in prosecution" (ok that's a stretch but they have a similar threat posted in the bathrooms to warn you against smoking, and I'm thinking this is just as important). 

I'm assuming everyone is familiar with the "dracula cough"...where you essentially cough into your bent elbow.  I recently witnessed a pilot friend do this better than anyone I'd previously seen (wish I had taken his picture to post here!)

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Since the likelihood of the FAA adding coughing instructions to the safety speech is zero (and probably shouldn't be their highest priority at the moment given the recent incidents of children operating as air traffic controllers)  what can we do?  Here's what I do.  Anytime a passenger next to me, or across the aisle, starts coughing, I ask them "do you smoke or are you sick?"  I get a variety of reactions to this question.  The most recent was a hostile "what do you think?" to which I replied "actually, it really doesn't matter to me what is triggering your cough...but I do care about the fact that you're not covering your mouth and are therefore exposing me to 40,000 droplets of potentially contaminated spray traveling 60 mph".  You can imagine his reaction - as I mentioned in a prior blog...someday I will be found dead in a parking lot. At least I didn't take his picture which I have to confess I was very tempted to do...as an illustration :). 

You're probably thinking "she's crazy!"...but imagine the impact if all of us took the time to dissiminate this same message, not just on a flight, but anywhere.  I think it could seriously have an impact on sick time/productivity.  Might be one of the more logical ways to reduce healthcare costs.

In the meantime, at the suggestion of the California doc, I carry these anti-bacterial wipes with me.  Now you're probably thinking if I used these on my recent flights they must not work since I have a cold.  I'm wondering the same thing....