Guide To Staying Healthy On Flights

For any frequent flyers out there who read this, I just came across a rather good piece on the Guardian site by Dr Luisa Dillner that is a nice little guide to staying healthy on flights. Being a bit of a frequent flyer myself I often worry about thins like this and on one particularly long flight to Sydney I remember cringing at the amount of people who seemed to be sneezing on the plane!

This is what I took from her piece;

The most common problems are complaints of dry eyes, skin and mouth, dehydration and catching colds. The main worry is getting deep vein thrombosis, which is a blood clot in the leg and can be very dangerous. However it occurs in only 1 in 6,000 people on short journey flights of around 4 hours and 1 in 1,000 people on longer journeys or for frequent flyers.

The cause for dehydration is said to be because the relative humidity of a cabin is about 20% compared to 40 to 70% in normal air conditioned buildings but there is no evidence that this causes dehydration directly.

The air in a plane is circulated every two to three minutes and is filtered as effectively as the air in an operating theatre so the main cause of catching a cold or infections is from being in close proximity to other passengers for a long period of time.

Blood clots are caused by peoples legs being cramped and stuffed into small places with tall people being effected more because of this. The easiest way to prevent Deep vein thrombosis is to move around and go for a walk as much as possible so that the blood gets a chance to move around your legs. If possible think about if you really need to go on a long flight to Bangkok or if you could have just as much fun on holiday only flying to Manchester…

You should visit a doctor if you think you have swollen, painful legs or if you are short of breath or have chest pains after a flight.

Hopefully this is good information to some people who fly often. I know it has made me less worried about the blood clots part that has been thrown around by the media quite a lot recently.

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