Can A Mop Fight Swine Flu? Docs Say Probably Not
When hundreds of children fell ill with the virus at a Queens high school last month, authorities promptly closed the building and spent days disinfecting desks and tables and running the ventilation system on full blast.
Alarmed union officials called for the same response – evacuation and a vigorous scrub-down – when flu cases popped up this week at the citys massive jail complex on Rikers Island.
But while such cleansing efforts are undoubtedly reassuring to the public, they probably do little to control the spread of the disease, health experts said.
“It never hurts to be cleaner,” said the citys health commissioner, Dr. Thomas Frieden, “but the main way flu spreads is people not covering their mouth or nose when they cough or sneeze.”
As frightening as it can be, the influenza virus is not a hardy one. Once it leaves the body of an infected person, it usually dies within a few hours.
Any surface left alone for 24 hours is unlikely to have influenza, said Dr. Paul Biddinger, associate director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness at the Harvard School of Public Health.
“Plus, you can wipe down the surfaces today, and then someone comes in coughing and sneezing and youre infected again,” he said. “Unless you are willing every hour and every day to wipe down surfaces, it isnt going to do much good.”
The mops relative ineffectiveness in halting the spread of the swine flu virus is illustrative of a larger problem facing public health authorities trying to contain the infection: Outside of developing a vaccine, there isnt much that can be done to halt the bugs spread.
Authorities have cautioned doctors against trying to ward off infection by prescribing antivirals such as Tamiflu, warning it could deplete the supply of the medication before they know whether the epidemic is serious or could give rise to a drug-resistant form of the virus.
In the U.S., public health officials have rejected restrictions on travel and public gatherings as draconian and probably worthless, now that the virus has spread worldwide.
“Nobody wants to see a repeat of overreacting when there is no real emergency,” said Dr. Stephen S. Morse, professor of clinical epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, citing the governments rush to inoculate people during a swine flu scare in 1976.
Some cities have reacted to outbreaks by closing schools. But even that step is questionable, experts said.
In most cases, he said, shutting a school once children have gotten ill means authorities have acted too late to halt the spread.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initially advised school systems to close if outbreaks occurred, then reversed itself, saying the apparent mildness of the virus meant most schools and day care centers should stay open, even if they had confirmed cases of swine flu.
Experts have studied all sorts of other methods of trying to control flu infections, from bathing hospital waiting rooms in ultraviolet lighting for eradicating germs to using aerosolized saline droplets to interrupt transmission. Nothing has proven effective enough to try on a large scale.
The best defense, repeated again and again by doctors in recent weeks, is for people to wash their hands frequently, avoid touching their eyes, noses and mouths, cover their mouths when they sneeze or cough and stay home if they feel ill.
“Youve heard this a million times,” Morse said, “but its good advice.”