Want to be prepared for a flu pandemic? You may want to stock up on face masks and hand sanitizer, according to a new study. College students living in residency halls who wore the masks for a few hours a day and regularly used alcohol-based hand sanitizer cut their risk of coming down with flu-like illness by up to half, Dr Allison E. Aiello of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and her colleagues found.
"We do think it probably would generalise to other settings in which you have people living in close quarters and eating in shared facilities" - for example military barracks or nursing homes, Aiello told Reuters Health in an interview.
Non-drug interventions like hand hygiene and face masks are likely to be important in fighting any flu pandemic, Aiello and her team point out. During the current H1N1 epidemic, they note, 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: mask plus hand-sanitizer, face masks only, or a control group. Aiello and her team kicked off the six-week study as soon as the university confirmed the first case of influenza on campus, but continued enrolling study participants for the first two weeks.
During those two weeks, there was no difference among the three groups in the incidence of flu-like illness; this is likely because the flu season was just beginning, according to Aiello. 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 percent to 51 percent less likely to develop flu-like illness than students in the control group.
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