Colds and Hand-Shaking

I have been pretty good for the past few years about avoiding catching colds.  Until recently, that is.  At the end of March, a cold-on-steroids invaded my body, giving me a lot of grief for a few days.  And now I have a more benign but still very annoying cold that someone transmitted to me a few days ago.

I am finding myself becoming more like the television character Monk, an obsessive-compulsive detective who tries as hard as possible to avoid shaking people's hands.  Personally, I find this cultural tradition to be loathsome and unsanitary.  At church, the congregation at the service's start are asked (I mean told) to stand up and greet each other, and then here come the dreaded, germ/disease-coated hands extended out to me.  I much prefer the Indian greeting of clasping one's hands together.  Sometimes, just to avoid a hand-shaking "incident", I'll just give out a perfunctory wave of my hand, accompanied by a winsome smile and soothing words of friendliness.  Before I see that dangblasted hand reaching out at me, in germ-attack mode!

I don't know for sure how I caught my current edition of the cold, but hand-shaking is my prime suspect.  And I wonder to myself whether the reason so many people show up late at church isn't because they, like me (and Monk) want to discretely avoid hand contact during that ritual...