Flu Or Mumps: Whose Team Is Next? (Scientific Technologies Corporation)

STC (Scientific Technologies Corporation, a leader in immunization intelligence™) released its most recent cartoon putting a new twist on the outbreaks affecting sports teams.

Mumps in the NHL has been in the news for the past few weeks, while it was flu in the NFL in January. Will it be basketball in March?

Teams take more and more precautions, but the nature of team sports offer unique challenges. As a former head trainer in the NBA once told the Los Angeles Times, “You can only control so much. If you want to get technical about it, the players shouldn’t even be passing the ball to each other.”

What can sports teams do to reduce the odds of infections? Moreover, what can all of our workplace teams do? One answer comes from little-known research published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2012 (Dag Vidar Hanstad, et.al.). After the Norwegian winter Olympic team had a tough time of it in the Turin games of 2006, with eight athletes missing competition (out of 75), the team undertook an aggressive prevention program for the Vancouver games. In addition to an extensive vaccination program, special indoor air cleaning systems were employed, there were “routines of minimized hand shaking and close contact with people outside the team,’ and carpeted hotel rooms were covered in plastic. In other words, the Norwegians created a germophobe’s paradise. So how did they do? They cut the number of missed competitions in half, from eight to four.

We can only conclude that every effort to protect athletes is good for the health of the team, and surely it gives a boost to morale, seeing the effort to protect the team.