In the school environment, where children are protected from healthy growth, many parents are relieved by the fact that school classrooms are being treated with anti-bacterism, and they feel that the child is “insulated” from the disease and will not become infected again. However, this is actually a mistake, and today we come to the truth behind it.
Antibacterial treatment sounds like an indestructible shield to the classroom. Schools usually use specialized antibacterial agents to spray and wipe frequently exposed surfaces, such as tables and chairs, doorknobs and walls, which inhibit bacteria, fungi breeding, reduce the number of microbes and reduce the incidence of disease. Like nanosilver antibacterial materials, the use of silver ion to destroy bacterial cell walls, thereby hindering their growth, does significantly improve classroom hygiene at an early stage.
But even so, in no way means that students are not infected. First of all, the source of the disease is far beyond imagination. Students play, talk, dance in the air, flu virus, gland virus, etc., in between classes, and these air-transmitted “infrequent visitors” can easily find new hosts even if they are anti-bacterial. Moreover, students’ personal effects, such as pencil boxes, water glasses, red scarfs, etc., without regular cleaning, can easily become a fungus “shelter” where microorganisms can be introduced to children at any time.
Besides, antibacterials are not fungi, and there is a difference between the two. Antibacterials are inhibiting the growth of micro-organisms and keeping their numbers low, while microbicide is aimed at their total elimination. Residual bacteria in the environment are only temporarily suppressed in antibacteria-treated classrooms, and bacteria and fungus “re-emerge” when conditions are appropriate, such as warm, wet monsoons, and re-emergence threatens the health of students.
In addition, the ultimate defence against the disease is the immunity of the human body itself. Children are less immune if their daily diet is uneven and if they lack nutrients such as vitamin C and zinc, even when the classroom is almost “unsick” and they are exposed to a small amount of external disease. The lack of sleep is also a “enemy” of immunity, and children who stay up the night tend to suffer the following day from mental discomfort, and their physical resistance drops in a straight line and the disease becomes available.
Having learned that, how should schools and parents respond properly? In addition to continuous classroom resistance, schools need to enhance ventilation, open windows on a regular basis every day, replace fresh air with indoor polluted air, and dilute bacterial concentrations. At the same time, health education is being strengthened to develop good habits, such as hand-washing, vomiting, coughing, etc., that prevent the transmission of the disease from its source.
Parents take care of the details of their children’s lives, ensure the provision of nutrition, ensure that the daily meals are full of fruit, vegetables, egg milk and cereals, and “charge” the children’s immune capacity; and supervise the children’s activities so that they can sleep adequately every night and contribute to the efficient “sitting” of the body’s immune system. Children’s school bags, clothing, etc. are regularly cleaned to prevent “diseases”.
Antibacterial resistance in the classroom is a powerful step in safeguarding the health of the child, but it is by no means an almighty safe. It is only by working together, with a comprehensive and multi-layered line of defence, to face up to the complexity of disease transmission that we will be able to make our children grow healthy in our schools, free from disease and truly free from the sea of knowledge.
