i was recently at a christmas party with my boyfriend and his uncle matt had a pennywhistle. well, there was alcohol involved and there were some pretty dubious looking folks there. to be gracious, i politely sounded one note on the pennywhistle. can i catch a germ?
I suppose you could in the same way drinking after somoene or kissing someone could pass germs.
It’s never happened to me though..
I knew 2 girls in Canada who got mono or something and their mom said it was from sharing clarinets at school.
One never knows.
I can assure you the chances of getting AIDS this way are zero. If bird flu comes our way, that’s another matter.
Bad Troll…No cookie for you.
Did you shake anybody’s hand? It’s a lot more likely that you’ll catch something that way.
I read somewhere that office computer keyboards and mice are more germ-laden than toilet seats..
SO … we should use “Toilet Duck” on our keyboards and mice?
I have heard, from a usually reliable source, that you can contract A.I.D.S. from a public lavatory…it is however, an awful place to bring a date 
Slan,
D.
I read somewhere that office computer keyboards and mice are more germ-laden than toilet seats..
…and the handles of supermarket carts
A friend of mine, an orchestral clarinet player, claimed that she’d reinfected herself with 'flu from playing her clarinet. I’ve no idea if that’s likely.
Well- I did have a doctor recommend throwing out toothbrushes after having a recurring respiratory infection.
After you’ve had the flu or a cold, you have immunity to that particular version of the bug. So, even if there are viable viruses on your instrument, you wouldn’t get reinfected with them.
It’s far more likely that a subsequent illness is caused by something else entirely, like another cold virus you got off a doorknob. There are hundreds of cold viruses.
The gross-out factor is what makes instrument mouthpieces such popular culprits. You don’t get grossed out by letting someone play your fiddle or guitar, do you? No, of course not.
You don’t get grossed out by shaking hands, handling doorknobs or other people’s computer mice, or grasping grocery store basket handles, either. I can just about guarantee that most everyone reading this does NOT wash their hands after using the toilet, even in public places. Or, if they do, they turn off the faucet with their newly-dried hands and open the exit door by grasping the handle or pushing with their palm on the door. Even hearing about this, most of you won’t get grossed out.
It’s just not considered disgusting to do those things. Should be, though. It’s a prime route for fecal-oral transmission of all sorts of things, and the transmission of cold and flu viruses.
But Lamby if we were grossed out by everything we touch wouldn’t we be sort of immobilized by fear? I have thought about the turning off the faucet thing, but sometimes don’t you just have to use your freshly washed hands? Like if the place has hot air hand dryers you couldn’t take a paper towel and use it to turn the faucet off. So if I let that freak me out, I’d just go nuts. I just try not to think about it. There is so much anxiety already. Oh and now that bird flu is coming. 
We both know that.
She was speculating that, since she had the 'flu, enough crud was entering the mouthpiece to keep the bugs happy for a while and to allow them to mutate. If this couldn’t happen, why would a doctor recommend throwing out an old toothbrush when you have a persistent 'flu? No doctor’s ever told me that but I’ve heard reports from time to time.
I’m certainly not immobilized by fear! Definitely not!
On the contrary, I whisk through my days secure in the knowledge that I have clean hands. Very clean. And I work in a hospital. I haven’t actually touched anything in there for years–not even the elevator buttons.
You’ll need a bit of advance planning to deal with difficult situations, but with practice this will become automatic.
If the place does not have hand towels, simply get a wad of toilet tissue before you wash your hands. Tuck it under your arm until needed. Then, use it to turn off the faucet. If the door opens inward, get another wad to use on the exit door.
Carry a neatly-folded paper towel in your purse, as well as some nice alcohol hand gel.
Bath and Bodyworks has really nice gel. It’s on sale right now for $2.50 Their antibacterial hand lotion is wonderful, too. Also on sale.
Purell makes excellent alcohol gel towelettes in individual packets. Sam’s Club carries big boxes of them. They’re nice and big, and have a slightly rough surface for improved scrubbing action.
No, that is impossible. Viruses require living cells. The crud in your mouthpiece is not living. Fungi might survive on it, perhaps, but fungi do not cause the flu.
I don’t know why a doctor would recommend throwing out an old toothbrush. I also don’t know how someone can have a “persistent flu.”
I think this is an old doctor’s tale. Or, a sneaky ploy to get you to change your toothbrush once a year.
While it might help in the case of a bacterial infection, like strep, it’s not going to help much in the case of viruses.
In fact, I’ve never seen a doctor who recommended this, but I’ve seen a lot of people saying they know someone who knows someone whose doctor recommended it. This makes me think it’s an urban legend. You know, like the doberman that choked to death on the burglar’s fingers and LSD being distributed to school children on the glue of stickers . . .
There are slow viruses that present with 'flu like symptoms and take ages to go away.
There are so-called low-grade bacterial infections that hide in the sinuses and seem to survive course after course of antibiotics, presumably because what survives mutates.
Those entities are not influenza. The second one is even bacterial. We were talking about viruses. They are different.
Besides, I change my toothbrush without waiting to get ill first. 
(Can you give a specific example of one of the first? The slow ones? Sounds interesting.)
I wasn’t talking specifically about influenza but about infectious mircro-organisms quite generally.
What Australians call glandular fever and Americans mononucleosis is a clear example of a slow virus. A more contentious case is chronic fatigue syndrome, once thought to be caused by a virus but now thought to be the common endpoint of several conditions. What I think is still uncontentious is that some of the causes are viruses, so these would be a family of slow viruses. Before CFS was even confirmed as a condition, victims seemed sure that the cause was viral and that it was most likely a family of conditions rather than a single condition. Funny how long it’s taken for medical science to catch up with anecdotal description.
I suspect you know all this so i imagine it’s just the terminology that’s new.
Yes you can get sick! viruses,what colds and flu are can survive outside the human body for up to 48 hours.The u.s. military did a study on hand washing at several of it’s U.S. bases the ones that inforced a regement
of handwashing 5 times daily had a 80% decrease in short term illnesses like colds and the infamous Norwalk virus.I recently had a bought of the
vomit/diahrea type bug that was given to me by my 7 year old she brought it home from school 2 days later dad was down for the count.
My wife and 9 year old son did not get it.My wife being a nurse washes her hands at least 20 times a day out of habit she made my son do the same.The unbeleivable thing is the morning of the day my daughter was sick I took a sip of her juice that is the only way we could think of that I was infected.
P.S. you cannot develop an immunity to the common cold virus.
and the aids virus can only survive outside of a host for appx. 90 seconds
and our pediatrician makes us throw away any toothbrushes after a bought of illness they are a veritable breeding ground and are difficult to sanitize.