By: Maureen Meosky
Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease: What do we know about it? Well, it’s spreading through our school, for one. Here’s what you need to know to reduce risk of getting this disease: handwashing, cleaning and disinfecting commonly used items, and avoiding contact with other people.
Prevention strategies are pretty straightforward. Just wash your hands, avoid contact, and generally be clean. Please follow these guidelines, if not for yourself, then for others. To find out if you have it or if you should be avoiding one of your friends right now, check the list of common symptoms for HFMD: If you start getting suspicious bumps on your hands, feet, or mouth (like the name of the disease suggests), you probably have it. Please spare us all and see the doctor immediately. Your conscience will thank you.
Once you have it, you’ll be contagious for about a week, although symptoms may last for up to 10-12 days. It’s actually most common in children from zero to five years old, so it’s kind of funny that it’s spreading through a high school. So you’d think that it just started with someone’s little sibling, right?
Interestingly enough, East High School isn’t the only place there was an HFMD breakout recently. On October 20, there was report of a spreading of the exact same disease at Princeton University. Nowhere else, and very close in the timing. So in conclusion: some overachieving kid went to Princeton on a college trip very recently and, not knowing that it was going around at the time (from around the beginning of the month to now), didn’t make any attempt to prevent the disease. They came back to school, still not knowing that they had it, and it spread.
It’d be kind of unfair/illegal to hold an investigation, so we won’t. But at least that person (if he/she, in fact, exists) won’t get HFMD ever again. So, there’s an upside: if you get it once, like chicken pox, you’ll never get this disease again.
To sum it up, wash your hands, look out for a rash, and don’t freak out too much about this whole thing. It’s not an epidemic, and it’s not Ebola, so it seems we’re in pretty good shape. So let’s all agree to just keep our hand sanitizers ready and wait this thing out. It’ll be over before you know it.
