Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2007-06-20 12:36
>>If the teacher is sick, whether it be a cold, gum disease, herpes or whatever, he won't ask to play your instrument. If you're healthy, and he's heathly, I see no problem other than one of you thinking it's gross.
>>
But there's the problem. Most people with HIV in industrialized nations know they need to take precautions, but in the age of antibiotics, people with self-limiting or at least curable illnesses have become cavalier about keeping their infections to themselves. Before my husband retired, he routinely ordered his subordinates who came to work sick to take their sick leave and go home, to prevent the bug spreading until half the office would go out sick and spread the infection to pregnant women or frail babies and elderly people. Self-quarantine is the best way we've got to safeguard the public health--but the same people just as routinely showed up for work coughing again anyway, next time they caught something. One of the people in his carpool was a regular disease vector. The workaholic culture has gone too far--and these days, I wouldn't trust a music teacher not to show up contagious for a lesson.
With more diseases becoming drug-resistant, reed-sharing and mouthpiece-sharing can be more than just a gross-out problem. I get Tony's humor about kissing--but, seriously, if we know someone well enough to smooch (I abominate "social kissing!), then we probably have a pretty good idea of whether or not the smoochee has galloping plague. We don't necessarily know that about a teacher we see once a week or once a month.
OTOH, just sharing a room with people can be a health hazard. Yesterday, the cellist in one of my husband's string quartets missed practice. Everybody thought some Hogwarts kid must have been messing around with the "Quartetto Confusio" spell again in his vicinity, but the truth turned out to be worse. Last week, he went to a music camp where he got placed into a quartet with someone who didn't have the courtesy to stay home and isolate his raging case of the flu. The sicko didn't lick our friend's cello strings or spit on his bow, but did *breathe*--and that entire quartet came down sick. Our friend, who's a doctor and otherwise healthy, ended up with such severe cardiac arhythmia that he had to check into the hospital.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
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The Clarinet BBoard
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