A funny thing happened to me last Sunday. I woke up in the morning and I couldn’t open my eyes. Naturally, I was concerned.
I shouldn’t have been so surprised though; I had been involved in a devastating food fight the previous night where both sides sustained serious casualties. I knew that many residents of the house where this food fight took place were afflicted with these same symptoms, but thought nothing of it as I made my calculated pudding assault on a few hapless victims. But then, just as I was ready to move into striking position, something terrible happened. Someone came up from behind me and with their dirty, germ-infested, disgusting hands, filled my eyes to capacity with a delightful mixture of ketchup and whipped cream.
I promise there is a point to all this.
In the past couple of weeks, pretty much everybody I know has come down with pink eye. I’ll bet even you, the reader of this article, knows at least two others who have been stricken. Now, I don’t plan to blame anyone other than myself for getting sick. No one forced me to get into a food fight with a bunch of infected and extremely intoxicated people. However, I think campus has a responsibility to step up their prevention efforts to ward off the spread of pink eye, flu and other afflictions in their hallowed domain. After all, the Pods, the library, the Union and the dining halls are all hotbeds of activity and steps must be taken to improve the sanitary quality of these locations.
For starters, no fewer than three times in the last week have I used a bathroom on campus and found the soap dispenser to be emptier than Elliot Spitzer’s apology to his wife. Basic disease prevention would dictate that extra soap be on hand so that everyone who uses the bathroom can wash thoroughly. And, on more than one occasion, the paper towel dispenser was empty, which undoubtedly discourages more than a few people from even washing at all.
The most underrated source for diseases are the keyboards in the Pods. One girl who frequents the domain on a regular basis told me that after a long and exhausting 15-minute search to find a computer in the over-crowded library Pods, she sat down and noticed a healthy and proud looking discharge sitting directly on the space bar, stuck to the key as if it had been camped out there for days. Should the people working at the information desk walk around checking all keyboards for nasal secretion? No. But I don’t think it would be so difficult for campus to provide students with hand sanitizer in classrooms and especially in the Pods to at least make sure no new germs make there way onto these valuable surfaces, and that no germs make their way to new destinations.
If campus doesn’t act quickly to improve sanitation, Health Services will continue to be over-crowded, students will continually struggle to make up work from classes they are forced to miss and more people will continue to get sick from germ transmissions that could have been completely avoided.