TRIP

Hand hygiene important in flu season

Best Health News, 2012

Using simple measures like keeping your hands clean can help to stop the flu from spreading, according to the results of a new study.
Most people recover despite it making them feel very unwell, but for older people and those with other illnesses, flu can be more serious.
Vaccines protect against the flu and are offered to those for whom a flu infection can cause more serious illness.
But it is useful to know if other measures, such as better hand hygiene, can help protect people from flu infection.
To try and find out, researchers in the US compared 1,178 young people living in university residence halls who were put into one of three groups during the 2007-2008 flu season in Michigan.
One group wore face masks for at least six hours a day while they were in their halls of residence and used alcohol hand gels, one group used face masks only, and a third didn’t use face masks or hand gels.
The researchers then recorded how many people in each group had an infection like the flu, and how likely people were in each group to have an infection.
After six weeks people in the group that used face masks and hand gels were 75 percent less likely to have become ill with an infection like the flu than people who used no extra protective measures.
There was no difference between how likely people who used face masks only were to have an infection compared with people in the control group.
Some people who had an infection were given a lab test to see if it was caused by the influenza virus.
In people who the researchers were sure had the flu virus, those in the face mask and hand hygiene group were 43 percent less likely to have the flu than in the control group, while those in the face mask-only group were 8 percent less likely to have the flu compared to the control group.