Masks, hand sanitizer can help stop flu spreading
Jan 28, 2010
Want to be prepared for a flu pandemic? You may want to stock up on face masks and hand sanitizer, according to a US study.
Researchers from the University of Michigan found that college students living in residency halls who wore the masks for a few hours a day and regularly used alcohol-based hand sanitizer halved their risk of coming down with flu-like illness.
“We do think it probably would generalize to other settings in which you have people living in close quarters and eating in shared facilities,” Dr. Allison Aiello told Reuters Health.
“We can probably even bring this to the household setting.”
Non-drug interventions like hand hygiene and face masks are likely to be important in fighting any flu pandemic, Aiello and her team pointed out in their study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.
They said during the current H1N1 epidemic vaccines were slow to arrive and use of antiviral drugs was “limited.”
To investigate what measures might be most effective in preventing spread of the flu, the researchers divided 1,437 college students into three groups, based on which residence hall they lived in.
One group used masks and hand-sanitizers, a second group wore face masks only, and the third was a control group.
Aiello and her team kicked off the study as soon as the university confirmed the first case of influenza on campus, but continued enrolling study participants for the first two weeks.
Aiello said during those two weeks, there was no difference among the three groups in the incidence of flu-like illness, probably because the flu season was just beginning.
But for the last couple of weeks of the study, she and her colleagues found that students using face masks and hand sanitizer were 35% to 51% less likely to develop flu-like illness than students in the control group.
While the face mask-only group were also less likely to catch flu-like illness than the control group, the difference wasn’t statistically significant.
Aiello said some studies investigating measures to prevent the spread of influenza don’t have people start using a particular intervention — like face masks — until someone in their household is already sick.
She said having people using the intervention at the very beginning of flu season was unique in this study.
“This fundamental study design difference may have improved our ability to identify an effect of mask and hand hygiene use, compared with studies of secondary transmission in which household members may already have been infected by the time of mask adoption,” the researchers said.
