You know the advice already — cover you mouth when you cough or sneeze, wash your hands, get your flu shot, get enough sleep, cough into your arm rather than your hands, so on and so forth.

How many of us actually follow that advice day in and day out? It seems a bit pointless to keep doing it after you get sick, right? The nastiness has invaded! Your defenses are useless! Why should you still keep them up?

I hate to break it to you, but this advice isn’t all about you. It’s about all of us. Yep, you understood me — your health has an impact on all of us. The advice may be for you, but it’s to keep us safe.

Head feeling a little tangled yet? It seems a bit weird that I should get so concerned about how frequently you remember to cover your cough — especially after admonishing your selfishness. But your illness affects everyone, and sometimes in very dangerous ways.

The tips reminding you to wash your hands, cover your mouth, those are to keep others safe. Not to make you sound like a villain — you don’t mean to endanger people, after all.

Look at it this way — the common cold to one person can do nothing more than make them a little less peppy for a couple of days. Some people just carry the virus, never getting sick. For others, it can lead to very serious complications like bronchitis, pneumonia and a whole host of other nastiness. And that’s just a little cold! What if you had influenza?  Many people are able to work and play with the flu, their symptoms never showing or causing so little worry that a doctor visit is laughable. But, according to the CDC, 200,000 people in the US are hospitalized yearly because of the flu.

It’s amazing how differently the same illness can affect each of us, isn’t it? Herd immunity is a nice goal for things like mumps and rubella, but with the ever-evolving strains of the flu virus — it’s a bit of a pipe dream. The same goes for the common cold; after all, there is no cure for the rhinovirus.

This is where you, dear reader, come in. Cover your mouth — not to keep yourself safe, but to keep those around you safe.

There is very little that you know about the person sitting next to you in your lecture, after all. Quick, how strong is the immune system of the girl to your left in your Bio lab? Do you know if your cashier at Wal-Mart has strong enough lungs to keep a cold from turning into bronchitis? For those of you who can answer those questions, and others like them, I bow to your omnipresence. For the rest of us though, we don’t know.

Remember how I said you weren’t the villain? Well, you’re not — but you could be the superhero. You — yes, you — can do a lot by actively doing very little. Remembering to cough into your sleeve could keep your classmate from a life-threatening illness. Get your flu shot — most insurance plans cover it. Wash your hands. Save people before they’re even put in danger! That sounds much better than being the unwitting tool to some villainous virus, doesn’t it?

It really is that simple. Most common sense is pretty simple when you think about it. And yet, so many of us (and yes, I’m guilty of it too) forget. We get lazy. We get complacent. And then people get sick.

So, the next time you feel a sneeze coming on, cover it up. Wash your hands after. Remember, you’re not just doing it for you.

Kjerstine Trooien is a staff writer for The Dakota Student. She can be reached at [email protected].