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I have gotten used to kids coming in my class with runny nose and all that. Sure it makes me get germs as well but I have learned to live with this as part and parcel of the job. It is hard to cancel and reschedule when you are teaching in a music school and are fully booked. I also believe like some of you in this post about building your immunization through this. I still get a bit annoyed when a child walks in with a cold but what can you do.

Hi Freminicricket, IMO, what you can do is send the child home if the parent is rude enough to send a sick child to a lesson. One child missing a lesson is completely different than a teacher getting sick and having to reschedule a week's worth of lessons! I have a feeling that the teachers who post comment like "building immunities to diseases," or "dealing with it," have been fortunate enough to suffer simple colds. After working full time for most of my life in an office, I started working in schools and with children about two years ago. I have been sick every two months for the last year and a half! I lost nearly two months total last year from illnesses, including H1N1 and a horrible viral infection that lasted 8 months (while catching every other virus that came along). It was the worst year of my life. I haven't been sick since April of this year, and last week, 3 students came in to lessons sounding very snotty, wiping noses, sneezing, and I am already sick! I am afraid I may have to give up teaching if this is what the future holds--parents leaving their kids off for a lesson so they have a free half hour, even if the child is ill, at the expense of me getting sick constantly. I have had all the tests, blood work, etc. and nothing, thankfully serious is wrong. I eat well, exercise, drink tons of water, no fats or sweets, salt or fried foods. Thre isn't much more I can do except send a sick child home if they are ill. Hand sanitizers are ok, but nothing works when a child sneezes all over the piano and I am sitting inches away from him/her.

A note:

Our mothers and our piano teachers did not wipe the piano with disinfectant.

Some of our students' mothers, and some of us, now do.

There seem to be a lot more sick kids now than before.

Coincidence?

The idiotic fantasy of creating a germ-free living environment without controlling what comes in from outside, promoted to gullible consumers by the manufacturers of various toxic products, is harming more than it is helping. There are a lot of reasonable things to do to keep from getting sick. Disinfecting your piano (and/or your house) is not one of them.

If you have a chronically sick child with no immune system, the first thing you do is not to go out and buy twenty bottles of disinfectant. The first thing you do is seal his environment so nothing can get at him. To do this for the piano, you will have to permanently board up and seal the front door, the back door, and all the windows. Then you can bring out the disinfectant, and it will actually do some good. But as soon as you kick down where the front door used to be, to go out and buy more disinfectant, your "clean .scheme" is ruined. It is not something you can catch up on or keep on top of. As soon as you un-seal your house, you are all the way back to square one, and you can never leave square one until you seal it again. Disinfecting your house is not just a losing battle, it's a lost battle. You lose already before you even start.

Of course, clean up messes. Of course, microwave the dish cloth to keep it from spreading salmonella instead of preventing it. But don't let yourself be fooled by the dangerous and toxic "germ-free house" fantasy. People have been trying it now for quite some time, and kids are just getting sicker and the bills for toxic chemicals are going up and up.

Someone told me this before. That by disinfecting everything, you are doing more harm because your immune system will get lazy or something like that. You are supposed to come in contact with germs for your immune system to be in practice although I don`t welcome them.

I'd be interested to know what credible sources David a is getting his info from as to an increase in sick kids. Can we also consider the other factors, such as pollution, chemicals, preservatives, additives, food dyes, hormones, too easily prescribed drugs to kids (for ADD, ADHD, etc.) fast foods, lack of common sense hygiene issues, and the myriad of other mixtures that are contributing to the resurfacing of such potentially fatal diseases as TB and Pertussis, or the horrid MRSA, H1N1, to name a few? Maybe teachers didn't wipe down pianos when I was a child, but I am fairly certain if the products that are available today were available back then, they'd be utilized.

You're quite right that people often misperceive risk, assigning out of proportion weight to low probability events while blithely ignoring much more likely things that they have simply become adjusted to hearing about (like auto accidents).

On the other hand, one important reason that things like SARS, or the bad variety of bird flu, afflicted so few people was the immediate epidemiological response by the health community.