Bitten by the holiday bug

I NEED A HOLIDAY. I can tell, because I just had one. Two supposedly restful weeks basking on a beach in southern Thailand have left me sneezing, wheezing and coughing.

If this was the exalted state of health to which I'd been hoping to ascend, I might as well have spread my beach towel out in the middle of Nathan Road. I would have saved a couple of grand on air fares and been bothered by fewer hawkers.

There is, however, one positive thing to come out of this ill-advised excursion. And that is the coalescing of a vague thesis into an inescapable conclusion: our holidays are killing us. Think about it. How many times have you sniffed, hawked and hacked your way back to the office after a sojourn abroad? Getting away from it all these days is a high-risk venture, involving increased exposure to all manner of nasties from the common cold to flesh-eating superbugs.

For starters, we all want to emerge transformed from the chrysalis of our vacation; crawling out of town, pale, pasty, sun-shunning grubs, only to flutter back on gently-scented zephyrs as bronzed butterflies. Which is fine, except all that basting on the beach, according to the latest research, is more likely to make your body the perfect venue for a viral clambake.

That's right - not only is the ultraviolet radiation sowing a crop of melanomas and basal cell cancers deep inside your skin and, in the case of 20 per cent of the populace, doing its best to cause a nasty rash known as a 'polymorphic skin eruption', it is also weakening your immune system and making you more susceptible to infections. This effect will doubtless have been exacerbated by the futile crash diet upon which you embarked a week before embarking. It won't have made any visible difference to those love handles unleashed upon unsuspecting beachgoers, but it will have made your body even more rundown. Thus, two weeks of trying to get a tan - which in my case usually breaks down into one day luminous white, five days lobster red, five days looking like an advertisement for those do-it-yourself peeling creams, and one day back to luminous white - should therefore have set you up perfectly for the plane trip home.

As everyone has probably read, cash-strapped airlines are wont to scrimp on the amount of fresh air they pump though their planes, meaning the atmosphere at 10,000 metres is usually a foul miasma of sweat, foot odour, halitosis and stale flatulence. It also means the average cabin is a flying petri dish, a microbial breeding chamber where loathsome lurgies lurk.