For the Love of Animals Developing a Spiritual Life Living Fully in Our Bodies Inviting Nature into Our Lives Living Mindfully Each Day Living Out Our Inner Vision Living Out Our Global VisionCompare All kinds of ac r22 rotary compressor used split air conditioner unit for industrial water chiller Lanhai Compressor Co., Ltd. US $45-90 1 Piece Transaction LevelWhen traveling, your hotel is your home away from home. But you and your family may have unwanted company — your hotel room could be a haven for germs, parasites, and other threats to healthy travel. Before you book your next getaway, know what dangers could be lurking in hotel rooms and how to avoid travel sickness. Sub-par air quality in your hotel room can quickly put a damper on your trip and increase the chances that you’ll get sick. “Stale air is unhealthy. It invites irritants into the body,” says Gaylen Kelton, MD, professor of clinical family medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine and IU Health Travel Medicine in Indianapolis.

“It can aggravate allergies and just be a nuisance.” Cigarette smoke is a common irritant. Most hotels in North America offer the option of non-smoking rooms, but they may be harder to find internationally. “In China, even though there are no-smoking signs on the walls in the hotel rooms, they still reek of smoke,” says Dr. Kelton. If you do smell smoke or stale air, Kelton says it’s best to resist the urge to turn on the fan or air conditioner. air handling unit sectionIf the air filters aren’t changed regularly, you could make matters worse and blow more irritants into your hotel room. wall mount ac unit installationInstead, open a window to get some fresh air into the room.carrier ac parts dealers in delhi

Most people expect to find germs on surfaces like door handles and toilets in a public place like a hotel. But research shows the highest concentrations of germs in hotel rooms are often in places many people don’t hesitate to touch as soon as they set their bags down. A small study of nine hotel rooms presented at the American Society for Microbiology in 2012 showed remote controls, telephones, carpets, and bedside lamp switches contained high levels of fecal and aerobic bacteria. Those types of bacteria could lead to gastrointestinal illnesses, among others. Researchers found that cleaning items on maids’ carts, like mops and sponges, also had high levels of both types of bacteria. That raises the risk of spreading potentially disease-causing germs from room to room while cleaning. To prevent hotel room germs from spoiling your trip, bring sanitizing wipes and wipe down high contact surfaces when you arrive. Also remember to wash hands frequently. Germs may actually be the least of your worries in a hotel room bathroom, says Kelton.

Bigger threats to healthy travel are slips and falls on unfamiliar territory. “More accidents happen in showers from falls than anything else when traveling,” says Kelton. In hotel room bathrooms, you may encounter a different setup than you're used to at home, and that can trigger falls, says Kelton. For example, you might have a walk-in shower at home, but at the hotel, you have to step into a tub shower. Or the floor may not have a mat or carpet and could become slippery when wet. Another often-overlooked danger in the bathroom is scalds and burns. “Hotels have the hot water set at a higher temperature than at home, so you need to gauge the temperature appropriately,” says Kelton. “Kids may turn on the hot water all the way at home and be okay, but the hotel’s water is hotter.” A final water warning for international travelers: Kelton says that if you aren’t going to drink tap water anywhere else on your trip, don’t do it at the hotel either. That means using bottled water to drink in your room as well as to brush your teeth.

Dust mites, down comforters, and other potential allergens might trigger the sniffles in particularly sensitive travelers — allergy and asthma sufferers, we mean you. If you have allergies or sensitive skin, Kelton says it’s worth calling ahead to ask if the hotel offers allergy-friendly rooms or if they can tell you what cleaning products they use — harsh cleaning solutions or laundry detergents can also be irritating if you have sensitive skin. Some hotel chains will also allow you to pre-order foam rather than feather pillows. Kelton also advises against trying the tempting free toiletries at hotels if you have sensitive skin. “Using a new soap or shampoo may cause some people to have a reaction,” he says. What's most surprising about bed bug infestations is that they're still a problem. Since the late 1990s, they've had a worldwide resurgence. Bed bug infestations have now been reported in all 50 U.S. states, often in hotels. The blood-sucking insects feed on people.

Bed bug bites can start out as small pricks in the skin, but can grow and become inflamed and cause itching. More than 40 disease-causing pathogens have been detected in bed bugs, but the good news so far is that there's no definitive evidence that they transmit any disease to humans. To reduce your risk of becoming a bed bug’s dinner or means of transport to its next meal, follow these steps: Taking these precautions involves some legwork (and detective work), but it all translates to a better travel experience.In one of his more meteorological moments, science-fiction author Robert Heinlein cheekily explained the difference between climate and weather: "Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get." Air-conditioning is what humans use to make sure that what we expect and what we get resemble each other. There were certainly other ways of trying to outsmart the weather before air-conditioning came along, at the dawn of the 20th century. During a third-century summer, the eccentric Roman Emperor Elagabalus sent 1,000 slaves to the mountains to fetch snow for his gardens.

And fans — be they electric gadgets or palm leaves wielded by servants — have helped create their share of faux wind. But it was AC that truly signified the onset of man-made weather by both cooling air and controlling humidity. The first system was designed in 1902 by inventor Willis Carrier (the Edison of air-conditioning) as a solution to keep muggy air in a printing plant from wrinkling magazine pages. He successfully used coils to both cool and remove moisture from the air, and would eventually establish the first mass manufacturing plant for air conditioners. While the first home unit, proportional in size to early computers, was installed in 1914, air conditioners remained too bulky, noisy and full of chemicals to become widespread for several more decades. Advances in technology eventually yielded the more convenient window air conditioner in the late 1930s, though it remained out of reach for most. The general public — those not privy to the few luxurious hotels and cars that used cooling systems early on — often first encountered air-conditioning in movie theaters, which started to widely use the technology in the 1930s.

Before the window unit's heyday, Carrier produced a system for theaters that cost between $10,000 and $50,000. It was one of the few things proprietors sprung for during the Great Depression, and theaters were one of the rare places where the hoi polloi could enjoy chilly, artificial air. In the beginning, as with all new things, air-conditioning was regarded as a luxury, especially for tightfisted bosses who viewed such worker comfort as contradictory to the sweat they were paying for. So in the 1940s and '50s, the air-conditioning industry gave its product a different spin. Keeping employees cool was simply a matter of productivity, and there were numbers to prove it. According to Gail Cooper's Air-Conditioning America, tests of federal employees showed that typists increased their output by 24% when transferred from a regular office to a cooled one. By 1957, the AC's early reputation for making workers lazy had been successfully inverted; Cooper writes of another study showing that, by then, almost 90% of companies cited air-conditioning as the most important factor in office efficiency.

America remained at the forefront of AC adoption. In 1947, British scholar S.F. Markham wrote, "The greatest contribution to civilization in this century may well be air-conditioning — and America leads the way." By the time 1980 rolled around, the U.S. — which then housed only 5% of the world's population — was consuming more air-conditioning than all other countries combined. Essayists lamented people's reliance on the electricity-devouring invention. "It is thus no exaggeration to say that Americans have taken to mechanical cooling avidly and greedily," remarked former TIME writer Frank Trippett in 1979. "Many have become all but addicted." Over the years, air-conditioning has been credited with the survival of institutions and industries: the heat-sensitive world of computer networks; the U.S. federal government, which often had to shut down in swampy Washington, D.C., before the embrace of man-made coolness; But even the cool bliss of AC has raised the temperature of some critics.