FRIDAY, Aug. 12 (HealthDay News) — American children miss 22 million days of school each year due to colds, flu and other infections, experts say.

But that statistic should come as no surprise to the nation’s teachers: In a new survey, seven out of 10 say their classrooms aren’t regularly disinfected by custodians, and more than half say they spend their own money and time ridding their classrooms of germs.

“A few are even recruiting parents to come in and, instead of helping them correct papers, they are asking them to help disinfect the classroom,” said Dr. Paul Horowitz, medical director for pediatric and adolescent clinics at Legacy Emanuel Children’s Hospital in Portland, Ore.

Horowitz released the survey results at a special “Back to School” press briefing on children’s health, held Thursday in New York City and sponsored by the American Medical Association.

Childhood infections like colds and flu that are transmitted in the classroom are more than a nuisance. The average American child contracts 6.5 colds a year, each lasting at least three to five days, Horowitz said. Besides keeping kids home from school and lowering their in-school performance, infections like these cause parents to miss an estimated 126 million workdays annually caring for a sick child, Horowitz added. Germ-ridden classrooms take their toll on teachers, too: the average teacher now clocks an average 5.3 sick days per school year.

It’s seo services not that teachers aren’t doing their best to keep classrooms clean. For the new survey, teachers from across the country were encouraged by the Scholastic publishing company to fill out an online questionnaire at the company’s Web site. A total of 614 teachers who taught during the 2004-2005 school year completed the survey.

“Most said they considered their classrooms clean,” Horowitz said.

But companies most of the teachers also understood that clean doesn’t mean germ-free, especially when obviously sick kids show up for class.

“Nine out of 10 teachers reported that children often come to school sick,” Horowitz said. “I see this myself in my office — a child will come in quite ill, and I’ll be told they’ve been ill for three days, and this is the first day they’ve actually missed a day of school.”

And sick kids mean sick teachers: According to the survey, three-quarters of teachers believe that they contracted some form of transient illness from children they taught during the previous year.

Every desktop, pencil sharpener, doorknob and faucet an infected child touches becomes colonized with germs, Horowitz pointed out. Unfortunately, “70 percent of teachers reported that their janitorial staff does not regularly disinfect their classroom,” he added.

For many teachers, there’s only one solution. “More than half (56 percent) say they take what little salary they get, and go to the store themselves to buy products to help clean their classrooms,” said Horowitz. “They are going out and spending their own money on cleaning supplies because they identify this as such a big problem.”

Even so, just two-thirds of teachers said they regularly disinfected students’ desktops (a major source of infection), and less than a third said they regularly disinfected other germ-laden objects in the classroom such as doorknobs and paper towel dispenser levers.

So what can teachers — and parents — do to cut the risk?

First and foremost, Horowitz said, is to encourage hand washing.

“We know that [child] absenteeism is reduced by nearly half with just regular hand washing,” he said. “Use the appropriate technique though — water and soap with vigorous rubbing for at least 20 seconds, about the same amount of time it takes to sing the ‘Happy Birthday’ song twice.”

Added Janis Hootman, immediate past president of the Natio