You still need to wash your hands with soap and warm water though. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The most dreaded time of year rolls around every winter like clockwork: cold and flu season. The time when hand washing increases, sanitizing surfaces intensifies, and old and young schedule regular seasonal vaccines in an attempt to prevent sickness from descending on their households. But there's one piece of ammunition you should absolutely skip this season--and all year-round--because it does more harm than good: antibacterial hand soap.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. "Game of Thrones" may be over, but winter is still coming. That means the dreaded cold and flu season is right around the corner. "A visit with a clinician has become increasingly common for upper respiratory symptoms since the COVID pandemic," Mark Fendrick, M.D., a general internist at the University of Michigan, who is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, told Fox News Digital.

"It's always easier to do business if you already know what's going to happen." This playful phrase recently became an inspiration for the consumer health marketing team at the global life science company Bayer in the creation of a forecasting model to, in essence, try to predict the future. Specifically, the team wanted to predict cold and flu search trends around the world to help reach people with the right products to alleviate their symptoms. Eric Gregoire, SVP and global head of digital and media at Bayer, said the project started in Australia ahead of the nation's cold and flu season this year. And the prediction model was so successful in improving digital marketing performance that the team intends to exapand the project globally.