HUG inventor- "Don't hug during flu season"..Also-Waiting room hazard?

[billlll]

1. Leo Buscaglia brought hugging to our country 1978. He urged handshakes in flu season.

2. Dr on NPR last January-not today-- advised avoiding ER because of flu hazard there... Yet I
Recall some study yrs back saying no risk in Dr's waiting rooms.

Any recent overview of science on waiting room hazard?

Do advanced places like finland have phone-booth-like containers around waiting room chairs...with individual air supplies from the outside? With dr's royal incomes they can well afford it.
Used to see row of complete ph booths,totally enclosing, row of twenty at airport. So such CAN be built.

To me , disease spread in wait rooms seems obvious.

Another ugly secret of US healthcare...part of why we are 49th in longevity IMO.

49th was on DU yesterday.

[trumad]

1. I prefer the fist bump...

[trotsky]

2. Nobody in the USA hugged before 1978?

Fascinating!

[billlll]

4. handshakes were 99% of it

u hugged spouse, kids.

[HuckleB]

5. Hardly.

[billlll]

7. see hugs widespread in old TV? Never. But on today's TV

Ur evidence?

[HuckleB]

8. TV is your evidence?

:rofl:

That's funny.

[salvorhardin]

9. That's a good idea looking to older television and film for cultural norms

The problem with it though is you're only sampling a very narrow slice of society. Film and television in the U.S., even today, primarily portrays middle and upper class WASP culture and norms. There's a little more diversity in recent years but not much. I have no idea what the prevalence of hugging outside of the family was for that WASPs in the middle of the twentieth century but I'd be willing to bet it's much less than in many other cultures. Just observing Italian Americans of that generation that I knew in my early 20s when I lived in a city with a large Italian American population says this is so.

[trotsky]

12. Lucy & Ricky slept in separate beds on TV.

So clearly before about 1950, no one in America slept in a bed with their spouse.

QED

[trotsky]

6. And your source for those stats is...? n/t

[MineralMan]

3. The Christian Side Hug is OK, Though.

That's what I hear.

[LeftishBrit]

10. During the swine flu scare in the UK...

patients were advised not to go directly to the GP with flu-like symptoms, to reduce the chance of infecting other patients in the waiting room. Instead, we were asked to telephone in the first instance and ask for advice. Also, toys and newspapers were temporarily removed from waiting rooms to avoid germ transmission through handling, and hand sanitizers were introduced to waiting rooms. These measures may have contributed to the swine flu not spreading as much as initially feared.

[SheilaT]

11. Trust me, even though hugging

has become a lot more common in recent decades, people hugged before 1978.

I also sincerely believe that the risk of contracting various illnesses, including flu, in an ER waiting room, is greatly exaggerated. However, people ought to use a little common sense about going to the ER or even the doctor's office.

I work in a hospital, although not in the ER. Last flu season, during all the stupid hysteria about H1N1 (and do I need to remind everyone that it turned out to be an unusually mild flu?) we'd see entire families, as many as 10 or more members, show up in the ER because one person thought he/she might have the flu.