Monthly Archives: June 2012

Cold vs ‘flu… which do you have?

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woman sneezingAt any time of year a cold or the ‘flu (influenza) can be quite yucky, and certainly inconvenient.  How do you feel when you catch a cold?  I had a cold recently and felt quite miserable.

A lot of people like to say they have the ‘flu (influenza) rather than a cold, because it sounds more serious… so what are the symptoms of colds and ‘flu?  (I asked a doctor)

Symptoms of a cold:

  • cough
  • sore throat, maybe hoarseness
  • runny nose
  • nasal congestion
  • sneezing
  • low grade fever
  • headache
  • body aches and pains

The common cold is a self-limited contagious illness that can be caused by over 200 different types of viruses. The common cold is medically referred to as a viral upper respiratory tract infection. What does that mean?  Well, because it’s self-limiting, it will go away on its own.  I know it feels like forever when you’ve had one, but the normal cold will last about three weeks, and usually, people feel much better after the first week.

Because it’s a virus, it means it won’t respond to anti-biotics, so they won’t help at all.  If you get a secondary infection (we’ll look at those below) then anti-biotics may be helpful.

As you’ve probably guessed, the fact that colds are caused by so many different viruses, we can’t build up immunity to all of them, which is why you can catch a cold multiple times every year.

What about the ‘flu?Man blowing nose

Some of the symptoms of the common cold and influenza may be similar, colds tend not to be as severe.  The ‘flu tends to be more abrupt in the onset too – rapid symptoms such as fever, chills, headache, substantial muscle and body aches, a dry cough and extreme weakness.  You can be feeling perfectly fine one day and miserably sick the next… this is probably ‘flu.

Because the ‘flu is only caused by one species of virus – the influenza virus – it is possible to be vaccinated against the ‘flu.  The virus mutates, which is the reason you need to be vaccinated every year.  Many people say they get the ‘flu immediately after being vaccinated.  More likely, they get a cold soon after… and it’s associated with the vaccination.

Like a cold, the ‘flu is a virus, so anti-biotics will not cure it.  Time and rest will help your body to fight it off, and plenty of fluids for both colds and ‘flu, as dehydration is a problem.

Man scratching eyeWhat about Man Flu?  That’s much worse, isn’t it?

“Man ‘flu” is, as we know, only a normal sickness where the person feels much more miserable and in need of sympathy.  Women can catch this too!  If you’re feeling sooky and miserable (and let’s face it, if you’ve got cold or ‘flu, that’s likely!) then take the time to rest, put your feet up, wrap up in a blanket with tissues close at hand and have a nice hot drink.  Maybe go back to bed.  This is a good time to cosset your body and give in to those urges to rest without feeling any guilt.  The more you rest in the early stages of the illness, the sooner you’ll feel better!

Is there a cure for cold or ‘flu?

Time, lots of rest, plenty of fluids.  The over-the-counter “remedies” you can get will help to alleviate the symptoms and make you feel better (sometimes) however it’s still a good idea to rest, rather than carry on as if you’re 100%.  Taking extra vitamins or supplements may help your body by boosting your immune system, but really, you’d need to be taking them all year ’round, and a balanced diet and good healthy lifestyle should give your body all the support it needs.

Obviously, if you’re concerned, see a health professional!!  They can help you if the symptoms don’t go away, get worse, or seem a bit more serious than listed here.  If you get a secondary infection – like a sinus infection from the stuffed-up nose – then anti-biotics can help (but not with the original cold) – and your doctor will know how to check for infections.

An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure

The balanced diet and healthy lifestyle is your first defence, and your best way of fighting off diseases.  Your body is amazing!  Give it the support it needs.  Fresh air is something your body needs plenty of, even in winter.  Lots of people in small enclosed spaces means the viruses can get to more people.  If you are sick, or in contact with sick people, wash your hands regularly, using warm soapy water.  Hand sanitisers may seem like an easy option, but the alcohol in them can dry out your skin and allow bacteria freer access.

Those antiseptic sprays might also seem like an easy option, but they do spray toxins in the air and you want your body to have the cleanest air possible at this time.  Try just wiping surfaces instead – tea tree and eucalyptus oils are natural anti-septic agents and will kill viruses and bacteria.  With any antiseptic wipe, remember to rinse the surface afterwards with clean water, especially if preparing food – you don’t want to be putting antiseptic stuff into your foods.

Family in a parkObviously breathing fresh air and staying active is a benefit all year ’round.  So is making sure you don’t have toxins or pollutants in your home – especially when you’ve got the windows and doors closed and you’re trying to keep warm.

These can include gases from your stove or heater, or from clothes or furnishings being heated up and releasing toxins from the fabric.  Gases from paint, furniture, curtains, floor finishes, carpets, building material… you name it!  Give me a call if you’re concerned about what’s in your home, and please feel free to comment below.  Have you had Man Flu?  :-)   Has a partner?  How do you cope with their sookiness, or your own?

Pauline Ferguson
Queensland's leading Building Biologist, helping you to detox your home or workplace and achieve a balance between today's busy & techno-dependent life and nature.

Depression and Mould

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Fenrir, my other black dogIf I may share a confession with you, the dog on the right is not my only black dog.  He is, undoubtedly, the one I prefer to spend time with (and my white dog), but he’s not the only black dog in the house.

Sometimes I get depressed.  It’s not so bad these days, I’ve worked out a lot of the warning signs and I have strategies to deal with it… but sometimes the black dog does get to me.

The other thing I’ve found is that like with any chronic illness, there are triggers.  If you can work out what your triggers are, you can do something about them, right?  Hopefully, you can avoid them.

One of the triggers I’ve found, and it doesn’t only affect me, is mould.

Yep, that’s right, mould.  It’s not just yucky, toxic, dangerous and revolting to have in the house, it can also trigger depression.  Yay!  However it’s not all bad news.  At least if you know mould can be a trigger for depression, you can look for it when you have an attack.

Why would you want to do that?  Well, if you remove the mould, the depression can lessen, and you’ll feel better.  I found this out early 2012 – we were having serious rainfall, and the house I was living in had drainage issues like you wouldn’t believe.  Everywhere was damp, humidity was above 80% every day and yes, you guessed it, mould was rampant!

Anyway, one evening I’d been feeling a bit low (stress, I thought) and knowing that everything feels better to me after I’ve had good sleep, I went to bed.  Next morning I woke feeling okay, walked out to the lounge and the black dog started growling.  Not Fenrir (in the picture), the other one… I felt awful!  Was close to tears, felt like nothing was going right, I was a complete failure, who was I kidding… you probably know the words to this tune, right?  On my way back out of the lounge, I noticed there was mould on the bookshelf.  Lots and lots of mould.  I hadn’t noticed it the day before, but it was certainly there now!

Closeup of mould on a bookshelfYuck.

But at least I could do something positive!  I could get rid of the mould!  So I got out the vinegar, water and tea-tree oil, a cloth, and started wiping.  I still felt really sad that there was mould on this bookshelf, especially as I didn’t want it in my books!!  However, once the mould was gone, I felt a lot better!!

Now you could argue that’s because I did something positive and productive.  You could say that’s because I was active and worked some endorphins through my system.  And both of those statements would be true.

However, it’s also been proven that the mycotoxins* released from mould can seriously affect the emotions and the functioning of the brain.  I do know that whenever I answer the phone and my client is in tears even as I’m greeting them, they probably have a serious mould problem in the house.  Please note, if this sounds like you, you’re not going mad, no it’s not you… it’s the mould making you feel that way.

If you are having a mould issue, please note that bleach (chlorine products) do not get rid of mould.  They will take the colour out of the mould, so it’ll be nice, clean mould, which you can’t see.  The mould you wipe away will be gone (98% of mould removal is the physical removal of it) but it will grow back.  Sorry.  And to top it off, bleach isn’t good for you… so you’ll probably get a headache, and the mould will still come back.  Remember the goal of companies selling mould removal sprays is not to remove mould… it’s to sell more sprays.  Vinegar, water and tea-tree or oil of cloves is good.  The worst effect I’ve had from vinegar is a craving for hot chips, and oil of cloves makes me want apple pie.  Hey, at least it’s not a headache!

So if you’d rather cuddle a warm, living, furry black dog than battle the metaphorical one… check your house for mould and other chemical depression triggers.  Be well!!

Fenrir and DiamondYeah, cuddling dogs is good for you!  :-)

*(myco = mould, toxins = toxins, so mycotoxins = toxins from mould)

Pauline Ferguson
Queensland's leading Building Biologist, helping you to detox your home or workplace and achieve a balance between today's busy & techno-dependent life and nature.

Is occupational asthma a problem in your workplace?

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Occupational asthma is asthma that is caused by, or exacerbated by, something in the workplace.  This can be anything from excessive dust to chemicals used in the workplace or even off-gassing from the cleaning products used.

I’m sure we’ve all had a reaction at some stage where something makes us cough… imagine that developing into trouble breathing, where your airways constrict and you feel like you’re choking and coughing, and you have some of the symptoms of asthma.

What if these symptoms are caused by something at work?  We can’t afford to just stop working, can we?  Bills don’t stop if we get sick… and if we are a business owner, the business doesn’t stop either – customers will understand a cold or ‘flu, but something serious and chronic like asthma needs a bit more thought.

The Asthma Foundation have some great information on how to write an asthma management plan, and GPs are also a great resource for information on how to deal with this disease once you have it.  Of course, prevention is always going to trump cure, any day!!!

So how do you prevent the onset of occupational asthma?  The Department of Workplace Health and Safety have some great information about what some asthma triggers can be, albeit in general terms.  Unfortunately, actually identifying the potential triggers, and working out a strategy to reduce these, or if possible, remove them, isn’t always that easy.  Your Workplace Health and Safety Officer (if you have one) may be across this subject, but if you work in a specialist industry, chances are very good that your WHSO specialises in the hazards specific to that industry, which may not necessarily include asthma triggers.

One gentleman I worked with recently (John) had a similar issue.  He’s a painter – he paints houses and offices for his clients.  John knows that you should always try to have good ventilation when painting, but that’s not always possible.  He prefers working with no- or low-VOC paints, too, but again, not always possible.  John had been having a lot of headaches, and had recently started to develop a bit of a cough when he called me.

Paint fumes can be toxic. Lids can contain toxic fumes, but only when they’re on the tin.

Together we looked at John’s working habits, hours, and processes.  As with any business, there were specific things that had to be done, and some things that could be improved for efficiency, as well as safety.  John and I mapped out what he did when he painted a client’s place – from the initial preparation for the job, right up to completion.  John didn’t realise he did so much!!

We were able to work out a few areas that were key to John’s chemical exposure, which was central to his headaches and developing cough.  A couple of key areas were dust masks whenever John did any preparation work (he knew about this but didn’t always wear one) and a ziplock bag for John to keep his paint-rags in when not in use (to restrict the fumes) and always replacing lids immediately after using chemicals and paints.  There were a few more specific strategies that John will implement to minimise hazards in his workplace, but the plan for WHS is now there for him to continue.  I’m glad to report that when I last spoke to John his headache had gone, and so had his cough.  :-)

The key things to implement in your workplace are:

  1. Work out what the hazards, chemicals and potential asthma triggers in your workplace (and travelling to and from that workplace)
  2. Find ways to remove those hazards, reduce them or replace them with non- or less-toxic alternatives
  3. Write down your strategy, make it easy to understand and easy to implement – if it’s too difficult, it won’t get done
  4. Follow through!
  5. Give me a call if you need help.  :-)
Pauline Ferguson
Queensland's leading Building Biologist, helping you to detox your home or workplace and achieve a balance between today's busy & techno-dependent life and nature.

Sci-Fi can show us what we should really fear

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Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m a bit of a geek.  No, really…

However, just because the image on the left, courtesy of Dr Who, is about this poor girl being controlled by those earpieces that look oh-so-much like bluetooth… doesn’t make bluetooth earpieces any less dangerous to your brain.  No, the chances of them being used to control your thoughts and program you into betraying the human race is very low.  Unless the person on the other end is very persuasive…  Lol.  So no, I’m not talking about you being “upgraded” to a cyberman…

I am talking about the radiation being emitted very close to your head.  It’s worse for mobile phones, but that didn’t work with these cool pics.

Seriously, though, if you do need or want to use a mobile phone, please please please use the earphones that came with it, or you can buy much cooler ones from computer or hi-fi shops… mine are metallic pink and very cool.

They not only make it clearer and easier to understand what the person on the other end is saying, your neck doesn’t hurt as much, you have hands free for doing things like taking notes, typing, surfing facebook or petting the cat!

All this with the added bonus that you’ll have much less radiation next to your brain.  And the brain is a pretty important part of you…

… and while we’re on the sci-fi subject, every time I see an ad for those anti-bacterial wipes or automatic soap dispensers, I remember Jeff Wayne’s musical the War of the Worlds… I’m listening to the part about the heat ray right now!

Why do anti-bacterial things make me think of Martians?  I’m glad you asked… it’s because, in this brilliant story, the Martians invaded and dropped the red weed on the planet, smothering us and everything here, and they had these enormous machines that killed us, and we had no recourse, no defence… until the lowly and humble bacteria got to the Martians, that is.  Those little things, invisible to our eyes, to which we usually have good immune defences, and in lots of cases, depend upon for our health… they saved us.

So every time I tell a new person what I do, and they think I’m talking about some new antibacterial, I wish I could scream “uuullllllaaaaahhhhh” in the way the Martians do… but I know that I’d probably get locked up, and the poor person would be (justifiably) quite frightened.  Lol.

We need bacteria.  We need to expose ourselves to some of it, to build up our immune systems, so that we don’t become like the Martians, unable to cope in a real environment.  We need to stop this “magic pill” desperation for antibiotics at the first sign of a cold, too… antibiotics don’t do anything at all to viruses (which is what colds and ‘flu are).  They do help bacteria (the yucky ones) build up an immunity to antibiotics, though.

There’s another reason I don’t like those ads, too…  they never show anyone wiping the poison off the benches before putting food onto them.  So we are encouraged to wipe the bench with poison, put food onto it, soaking up the residue, then eat that food…

… and while we’re on the subject of automatic soap dispensers… the selling point for these is that you don’t need to touch the dispenser with dirty, germy hands, right?  Please think for just a moment about what you do after you’ve touched the soap or dispenser.  You wash your hands, right?  So you don’t need to touch the dispenser with your lovely clean hands, right?  You only get your dirty hands on the dispenser before you’ve washed them, yes?  So why do you need one that “senses” your hands so you don’t touch it and get dirt or germs on it?

Anyway, that’s it for my ravings this morning!  I’m just up the bit where the cannons attack the Martian war machine, and it’s a good bit!!  Uuuuuullllllaaaaahhhhh!!!!!!

Pauline Ferguson
Queensland's leading Building Biologist, helping you to detox your home or workplace and achieve a balance between today's busy & techno-dependent life and nature.