by Angie Newsome
ANEWSOME@CITIZEN-TIMES.COM
August 8, 2006
ASHEVILLE — Lice. Colds. Ringworm. Ah, to be a kid in school.
Getting sick at school is a rite of passage, like learning to write or do algebra. Just take a look at the chart above, which includes everything from mumps to meningitis.
But there are some things you can do to keep diseases at bay as the school year gears up. Last year, a whooping cough outbreak spread throughout the county, more than 50 cases.
The top piece of advice from Dr. Susan Mims, medical director at the Buncombe County Health Center? Wash your hands.
“I can’t emphasize enough that with all the immunizations and all the things we offer that probably the most effective way to prevent the spread everything on the list is good hand washing,” she said. “We need to teach them to wash their hands and model that for them.”

Here is an excerpt of an interview with Mims about what parents and teachers can do to help keep children disease-free.
QUESTION: What can teachers and parents do?
ANSWER: Know when you are too sick to go to work yourself, which helps prevent the spread of illness.
And don’t send kids to school when they are sick. The most important time to keep kids home is 24 hours after a fever. But don’t keep them home too long.
“Especially after a cold or many of these respiratory illnesses,” Mims said, “kids have a cough for a little bit of time. We don’t want kids to miss so much school they’re in academic trouble, but we don’t want them at the most infectious time.”
Q: And when children are back at school?
A: Send tissues and teach good cough hygiene, like using tissues when they cough or sneeze. Teach children that if they don’t have a tissue, use the inside of their sleeve instead of their hand.
“Hand sanitizers do not replace hand washing with soap and water,” she said. “That friction of rubbing your hands together is as important as the soap.
“Some parents will send their schools with hand sanitizer. A lot of teachers have sanitizer in the classroom. While hand sanitizers don’t replace hand washing, they are an important adjunct with hand washing.”
Q: What is good hand-washing technique?
A: “That actual friction of with soap and water for the time it takes to sing ëHappy Birthday’ or their ABCs. If parents teaches it and the teacher reinforces it, that’s probably the single most important thing they can do to prevent the spread of infectious diseases.
“There are actually some other more common diarrheal illnesses that get spread around the community and are often quite contagious, again because of the lack of supervision or good hand-washing technique,” Mims said.
Q: What are some other ways to prevent the spread of disease?
A: Now is the best time for parents to double-check that their children are up-to-date with their vaccinations, especially pre-teens and teenagers who are oftentimes healthy and don’t see a doctor very often. Students going off to college and living in a dormitory should get a meningococcal vaccine.
“Some we can prevent across the general population with vaccines, others we can give a specific intervention after exposure to the disease,” Mims said.
Some of the diseases on the accompanying chart are required to be reported to the local health department, such as pertussis, hepatitis A and measles.
“Then the health department, in some cases, can provide an intervention — sometimes it’s a pill, sometimes it’s a shot — that can prevent people who have been exposed from getting that disease,” she said.
Contact Angie Newsome at 828-232-5856 or via e-mail at anewsome@ashevill.gannett.com.