Cough And Flu Lesson Plan

If you are trying to fight the influenza then it is important that you have what is known as a cough and flu lesson plan. Enter the viruses, to disrupt all the normally smooth-running parts of the upper respiratory system. As compared with bacteria, the other main category of disease germs that trouble humanity, viruses are markedly smaller and simpler. A typical bacterium— a streptococcus, for example— is too small to be seen with the naked eye but is easily visible under a conventional schoolroom microscope. Most viruses, by contrast— including those that cause colds— are about a hundred times smaller, perhaps a ten-millionth of an inch across, and are clearly visible only under the extreme magnification of an electron microscope.

In terms of complexity, a bacterium is a complete, living organism, a single-celled member of the plant kingdom, while a virus is as simple in structure as to make even its classification as a living body debatable. Under the microscope, a virus resembles a snowflake or a mineral crystal, for its shape is geometrically regular, like a many-sided box or a spiral. Unlike a bacterium, a virus has no mechanism for movement, no internal method of reproduction, no equipment for ingesting or digesting food— in short, none of the abilities generally considered minimum requirements for membership in the world of the living. A virus cannot even qualify as a cell. It is rather an assemblage of various chemicals that enable more new structures exactly like the virus to be produced, all surrounded by a protective protein shell.

A virus cannot even cause such duplication on its own. Only when the virus gets into living tissue can it multiply. Then it takes over its host, using the living cell’s own substance to produce more virus particles. The virus is very fussy about its unwilling host; for each kind of virus there is only one general kind of cell that the virus can subject to its rule. Its protein shell can form attachments to receptors on the surfaces of only one particular kind of host cell— rather like a key that will turn only in the lock designed for it.

This so-called specificity determines the seriousness of the disease induced by a given virus. The rabies virus, for example, becomes a considerable threat to life because it takes hold in brain tissue. The polio virus sometimes lodges in the spinal cord and brain stem. Still other viruses selectively infect skin, glands or gastrointestinal tract, causing warts, mumps or a form of diarrhea. Cold viruses, on the other hand, are keyed to attach themselves to the cells of the mucous membrane of the respiratory tract. The viruses destroy these cells one by one, but because the cells are located in tissue that is itself relatively superficial, the loss of these cells brings discomfort but seldom anything worse.

The cells of the upper respiratory tract can be attacked by some 200 different cold viruses. Identifying the one causing a particular cold is a painstaking, expensive process, and the technique involved is not readily available to the average doctor. Nor would it be of much use even if it were: There is no way to make a cold go away any faster by picking its perpetrator out of a viral line-up. But the ability to distinguish one cold virus from another is basic to the continuing search for methods of prevention, and the process is still unfolding. This is why it is ultimately important to have cough and flu lesson plan.

Many of the cold viruses share several identifying characteristics in addition to their affinity for the cells of the upper respiratory system. For example, the rhino viruses, responsible for as many as half of all colds, multiply best at a temperature of 910 F., in an environment that is less acid than kitchen vinegar, and in the presence of a rich supply of oxygen. This combination of conditions is precisely met in the nose and nowhere else in the body. But cold viruses also have certain other features that enable laboratory technicians to tell them apart and to identify a given virus as a member of one of several groups or families that are as different in shape and size from one another as robins are from giraffes.

Most colds that can be linked to a specific virus group are caused by rhino viruses, all shaped like a gemstone cut with 20 equal facets but differing in chemical make-up — there are more than 100 distinct types. They have been found to be particularly significant as agents of late-summer colds and the annual autumn cold epidemic that coincides with the resumption of school. Two related types, coxsackie and echo, identical in size and shape, occasionally cause summer colds but are generally responsible for serious illnesses such as meningitis, pleurisy and a heart disease called pericarditis.

The next common cause of colds is made up of corona viruses, so called because they are round or elliptical and covered with projections that form a kind of corona, or crown. Corona viruses are most prevalent in winter and may spread in epidemics — often a single type is responsible for almost every cold in a particular geographic area.

Other major virus groups thus far implicated in colds include the adeno viruses, named for the fact that examples were first isolated in a child’s adenoids. Viruses of this group are relatively large, with 20 facets that take a branching, snowflake-like form. Like virtually all cold viruses, these favor particular seasons, being most active in late winter, early spring and early summer, but of negligible significance in midsummer.

In adults adeno viruses produce ordinary colds at most. More than half of the infections detected in community studies were subclinical— that is, they produced no signs of sickness in the individual, and aborted quietly without so much as a handkerchief being raised. But in children, whose immune systems are not yet fully developed, the adeno viruses can cause more severe respiratory infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia. And in the closed populations of training camps, adeno viruses may also spread rapidly to lay low an entire military community. Learn to design your own cough and flu lesson plan.

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