Your iPhone or iPad can get me sick around this time of year. That’s because it’s flu season, and every time you sneeze into your hands and wipe it all over your touch screen device, you could be passing on a virus when you decide to share it with someone else. So unless you’re immunized for the season and you keep a small bottle of Purell with you at all times, I’ll be checking out your gaming high scores from afar, thank you very much. I don’t need your Angry Birds to give me swine or bird flu.
As The Sacramento Bee reports:
“If you’re sharing the device, then you’re sharing your influenza with someone else who touches it,” said Timothy Julian, a Stanford University doctoral student who co-authored a study on the spread of viruses.
You don’t want to be sharing your influenza with anyone else, do you?
I’m willing to wager that there are way more touch screen devices out there now than there were this time last year. We have the iPad, iPhone, Droid and every variant of it, the EVO and so on.
“If you put virus on a surface, like an iPhone, about 30 percent of it will get on your fingertips,” Julian said. In turn, “a fair amount of it may go from your fingers to your eyes, mouth or nose,” the most likely routes of infection.
If you’re like me and constantly rubbing your eyes from strain after staring at your smartphone just a foot-and-a-half away from your face for hours, it’s best to keep your device from others.
Here are some tips from yours truly for avoiding the flu this season:
- Wash your hands frequently and get vaccinated for the flu
- Grab some disinfecting wipes for your touch screen device
- Avoid sharing your phone if you think you’re sick
- Avoid the phones and tablets of people with runny noses and red eyes and an overall sickly appearance
- Spray your gadget with Lysol disinfecting spray
- Dunk your iPhone in a small bucket of bleach every night
- Stick your smartphone into an autoclave
- Get a job as a blogger and stay in your apartment 24/7 — you can’t get yourself sick, can you?
Of course, when it comes to my advice, it’s probably best to exercise a little discretion.