Stay healthy this winter
With influenza season arriving in Oklahoma this month, Lauri Smithee, chief of the Acute Disease Service at the Oklahoma Health Department, offers specific instructions for avoiding colds, germs and infectious diseases. Many of which involve basic hygiene.
“If you get sick, it puts you out of commission and that’s no fun, especially if you are a caregiver of children or other family members. There are important steps we all should take,” Smithee said.
Her advice:
- Wash your hands – You’ve heard this before, but washing hands before eating, after visiting the restroom, after changing diapers, after blowing your nose — is the best way to avoid illness .
- Carry hand sanitizers – Alcohol-based hand sanitizers, particularly the ones that are not antibacterial, are good substitutes for hand washing until you get home or to a location where you can wash your hands.
- Watch what you touch – Try to avoid touching things like bathroom door handles (use a towel), escalator rails, elevator buttons (use your knuckle) and pens at checkout counters (carry your own).
- Stay home – When you start to feel bad, stay home. Do not go to work, church or school, and do not visit a nursing home or hospital. This is the time you are most contagious, especially if you have a fever.
- Keep it to yourself – Sneeze into your elbow, not your hand ; if you cough or sneeze into your hand, wash your hands immediately and throw used tissue into the trash.
- Stay alert when traveling – Get all recommended traveler’s immunizations in plenty of time for trip abroad in 2008; don’t drink untreated water; if you become ill when you return home, tell your doctor where you’ve been.
– Jim Killackey, medical writer
Double the fun
When Dr. Terrence L. Stull, scientific director of the Children’s Medical Research Institute, asked me if I’d like to stop by his lab to be cloned, I thought he was kidding.
“Silly scientist,” I thought to myself, chalking his suggestion up to the gentle ribbing reporters often receive, “clone the newspaper guy and you’ll have twice as many inane questions.”
Ha, ha.
Turns out Stull wasn’t kidding.
He suggested taking a cheek swab and cloning the cell in his lab. He proposed I explain how the process works. The quirkiness of the suggestion aside, I was taken with the idea of teaching people about cloning.
For all the stories people read about cloning, few have a clue how scientists reproduce a strand of DNA, much less a monkey or sheep.
I did some related work while a biology student at the University of Tulsa but never really felt like I had a good handle on it. Nevertheless, DNA sequencing, genetics and related science fascinated and humbled me.
So, Monday morning I’m having a cheek cell cloned. Technically, an epithelial cell, which is a good place to start because it is easily accessible and fairly simple.
I hope to show how routine the process has become yet how far scientists, even those as capable as Stull and his CMRI colleagues, are from being able to clone a fully functioning Oklahoman reporter.
What is the most impressive to me is that technology has leveled the playing field in molecular biology. Researchers don’t have to have tens of millions of dollars or an endowed chair at Harvard to make a mark. We are all made of cells, and cells reveal their secrets to those who ask the right questions and look in the right places for answers.
I don’t know if any of my little experiment Monday will ever make it into the newspaper, or exactly what I’m going to do with it. If only there were two of me, then I could figure things out.
Jeff Raymond, Medical Writer
