It quite clearly says: ‘data showed that of those people who were infected, people whose infection turned into real-life symptoms—congestion, runny nose, sore throat, hoarseness, and so on—were about twice as likely to have contact with school-age children as people whose infections did not become symptomatic.’

It also did not define what constituted ‘contact’ or what ‘school-aged children’ are. I thought it went through great pains to explain: ‘ the study wasn’t designed to tease out a possible explanation’ .

You should probably read the article before writing your comments.

A logical link might be missing. No atttention seems to have been given to the state of the child when the contact happened, and why the contact happened. Are kids who are spewing contagious material more likely to visit grand parents, who are a sizeable portion of the population that has chronic lung disease? How many kids are left with their grandparents because they have been sick a while and the parents can’t take any more time off?

Do people who display more symptoms spend more time with children who are display symptoms? Maybe causality is reversed.

It is obvious that kids carry lots of diseases, especially if they are around a lot of other children every day, and that being around them when you have health problems is not a good idea. But the conclusion in the abstract, that being around kids is really bad, might not just strain families, but it might being missing really easy areas of improvement for everyone’s health.

(For some useful information, maybe researchers could look compare people who are symptomatic most of the time, and others who are not. Can you be symptomatic half of the time you have a cold? What are the populations doing that makes them different?)

The question could be: do families that discourage natural cleansing of the nasal passages and throat and lungs have kids and adults who suffer longer with longer (and other ailments) than families who practice sniffing, swallowing and nose breathing?

In my family, my father and several of his brothers suffer from chronic lung diseases, (COPD, emphysema, asthma,) even the ones who have not been smokers. What I noticed they have in common is that they’ve been trained that sniffing and swallowing shows poor manners, and they don’t drink water. Using handkerchiefs or tissues is the norm. They cough the same old stuff without swallowing. Occasionally they’ll spit into their tissues. Breathing though the nose is rare.

When my 3-year old son started having hay fever (yes, I’ll get back to colds in a minute), even though I had done everything I had read that might help prevent it, including living outside a city, so that he wouldn’t suffer like I did, I started comparing people who didn’t have the problem with me. My husband started me off by saying, when I was blowing my nose, “Why don’t you just swallow?” I was grossed out at first, but then started to try it. At first, swallowing sputum was really difficult because it was dried out, and tasted terrible. I made it palatable by greatly increasing my hydration by not only drinking water, but by breathing out through my nose. (My lips used to be dry and cracked because I was exhaling so much moisture through my mouth.) I started swallowing after coughing as well. Paradoxically, the more hydrated and closed my mouth was, the less my nose dripped. Soon I was able to become a nose breather, for the first time in my life.

Back to the colds issue: When I started drinking a lot more water so that I could sniff and swallow, and I started swallowing after coughing, I found out I recovered much faster from colds. Unlike before, I started to be like my husband, who hardly had any symptoms when he had a cold. I nagged my son to do what I was doing. His colds went from weeks-long events to less than a day. No more antibiotics needed. A study I read about but can’t find now (it was from Sweden) says that kids often copy the breathing behaviors of their mothers. Perhaps families with a lot of breathing issues are perpetuating bad habits of adults.

For several years I’ve been looking for signs of interest by the medical community in studying behavioral factors, and I’m disappointed that most of the time, anything new is inadvertent. I hope someone who really wants to help people improve their health will pay attention.

By the way, another study of parents – shows that the more kids you have, the less likely you were to catch their colds. See http://www.futurity.org/health-medicine/parents-less-likely-to-catch-a-cold/ . Don’t blame the kids.