I may have mentioned that my husband returned home from New Orleans with a vicious cold. For the past two weeks, I’ve been carefully avoiding it; tons of hands-washing, liberal use of Zycam, echinacea and Vitamin C, and even a bit of Airborne. Did I mention daily “doses” of red wine? It contains the largest amount of naturally occurring anti-viral agents of any food or beverage. And it feels good on a raw throat. (By the way, be careful with Airborne; it contains huge amounts of Vitamin A, which can be toxic–very toxic, very fast–to your liver. Don’t use it more than three times a day.)

Unfortunately, my husband persisted in being generous, and I now have a much, much milder version of his infestation. But compared to the cold that knocked him off his feet and, for the first time in the 20 years I’ve been married to him, sent him to bed (he was sleeping something like 20 hours a day–or attempting to), mine has remained in the scratchy throat, mild aches, and sniffles category. (I’m crediting Zycam for that; it really seems to work.) Although I have lost my voice–I taught a telelclass yesterday and strained it–but I sound so much worse than I feel.

However, I’m milking it for all I’m worth, soaking up the sympathy, and using it as an excuse to cancel working out, unessential meetings, and even a social gathering or two. And it’s not because I’m being lazy; honestly, I don’t want to be as generous as my husband and spread germs.

Which brings me to the point of this blog–I know, I know, I’m burying my lead–which is, if you’ve got a cold, for Pete’s sake, STAY HOME! Don’t spread it around. Don’t be “heroic” and show up at work anyway. Trust me, good management would rather cover for you than have to cover for the three to seven others in your office you’re going to infest.

I believe that our “carry on at all costs” attitude ends up costing us much more than it saves us. In fact, studies have shown that people who go to work with a cold aren’t very productive: in fact, the lost productivity from showing up for work sick adds up to about 60% of an employer’s health care costs. It’s cheaper for you to stay home. But even more than that, if everyone with the flu, or a cold, isolated him-or-herself while the plague ran its course, we wouldn’t have epidemics of the stuff. But no, we have to go to work, attend school, ride public transportation, go out to eat, etc. And everyone we come in contact with is exposed to our germs. They catch it, and then they spread it around even more.

When I was working on my Ph.D. in Microbiology (I really do know about this stuff!), we read a fascinating case study of just how quickly a disease spreads. Let’s do the math. If one person has a cold, and spreads it just to three people in one day then each of those three people spread it to three more people each the next day, (nine ill) and each of those nine spread it to three more people the next day (27 ill), and so on, in just one week, that first person will have indirectly infected over 6,500 people; in two weeks, nearly a million and a half. Just think of all the suffering, lost wages, etc. that could have been avoided if that one person had just stayed home!

Before the advent of antibiotics, people–entire families–with certain diseases would be quarantined until they were determined to be no longer contagious. (You may remember that scene from Little Women where Amy was sent to stay with Aunt Josephine because Beth had scarlet fever. A wise move, although Jo and Meg were also at risk; Streptococcal infection is not something we develop long-lasting immunity to.) And quarantine is one of the methods being considered to deal with another major influenza epidemic, like the one that killed nearly 50,000,000 (yes, fifty million, folks) in 1918. But why wait until the government has to step in? (Then you know that it will be heavy-handed, inefficient, inappropriate and too late.) Why don’t we start, right now, advocating that sick people STAY HOME and not infest the rest of us?

We could begin in the office place–managers, send those sickies home before you and the rest of the staff get sick too. And in schools. Sorry parents, I know how a sick kid messes up your schedule, but that’s where most diseases spread. How many times has your child brought you home the gift of a cold?

Got a sniffle? STAY HOME.  (Although we do need to be able to distinguish between infections and allergies. WebMD has a good guide: http://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/cold-guide/common-cold-too-sick-to-work)

Here’s an interesting statistic for you: there are more than twice the number of deaths per year from cold and flu (over 36,000) than there are from driving drunk (17,941 in 2006). And yet we have laws in place to stop the latter.

It’s time that we all stepped up, and when we get sick, we quarantine ourselves. A more liberal sick-day policy in the workplace (that include going home to care for your sick child sent home from school–or better yet, keeping your child home from school in the first place) would end up paying for itself. Annually, over fifteen million work days and twenty two million school days a year are lost to colds and flu; if people would simply stay home when they start to feel sick, we could cut that by 80 to 90%. (My guestimate, not a real number.)

I understand that more people decide whether to go to work or stay home based on the health of their bank accounts, not on their own health. After all, in some segments of the work force, no paid sick days are offered at all, and people may even be fired for being absent for too many days in a row. (That actually happened to me, once, and in a hospital, no less. You’d think a medical facility, of all places, should know better.) So change needs to happen from the top down, and preferably without the government getting involved. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to make that happen.

But for now, if you’re getting sick or feeling sick, STAY HOME! Everyone will thank you. And let me know–I’ll send you some chocolate.