Swine Flu: Why are People Wearing Masks?

[DSeid]

Whileit is “unclear how often flu is transmitted by contact with a person’s hands”

Lathering up with soap and water appears to be marginally better than using an alcohol-based rub for fighting the influenza virus, but both reduce the amount of the pathogen on the hands, says a study in the Feb. 1 Clinical Infectious Diseases.

“For the general public who have ready access to soap-and-water hand hygiene, this is highly effective,” wrote Dr. M. Lindsay Grayson, lead author and head of infectious diseases for Austin Health in Melbourne, Australia. “For health care workers where alcohol-based hand rubs are a far more practical and effective option in our current busy hospitals, [these are] also highly effective with comparable results to soap and water.”

And

Wearing masks and using alcohol-based hand sanitizers may prevent the spread of flu symptoms by as much as 50 percent

FWIW.

[Gaudere]

[Moderator Hat ON]

Why people wear masks is really more of a General Question, since it does have an answer…moving it over there.

[Moderator Hat OFF]

[Incubus]

I gotta admit, as a bus driver when they offered a box of masks one morning, I grabbed one and they got snapped up very quickly (many drivers were upset they didn’t have a mask to wear).

I work in an enclosed space, with many of my passengers mexican immigrants. When I open my driver’s side window it makes all the air in the bus blow right past my face :smack: along with all the germs getting coughed out by passengers. The day I wore the mask I drove a route that basically dropped off a bunch of day laborers to work in Gilroy. Admittedly yes, I was afraid of catching swine flu (though in my case the fear was getting very ill, getting laid off, then racking up medical bills. THAT is the source of my disease phobia, not death ) and thought wearing the mask could help- about a quarter of my passengers (mostly the white and asian variety) were wearing masks as well.

However, it didn’t work the way I thought. First, the mask for me was incredibly uncomfortable, kept making my nose itch, and caused my glasses to fog up. That, combined with having to drive in the wee hours of the morning with the rising sun in my eyes made me decide the mask was more of a hazard than a help, and I yanked it off after 2 hours. Also, people seeing me (the bus driver) wearing one of these masks I think made them worried when they got on the bus.

[AskNott]

Well, I gotta say, I was embarrassed. Why weren’t they more clear? I went to the supermarket, and a few people were wearing little blue or white patches of cloth that cover their noses and mouths. I was the only one in the whole store in a Spider-Man® mask.

Maybe I’ll get the piggy-fu, but I took off the mask before I got to the produce section.:smack:

[Harmonious_Discord]

The doctors on the television news said that after a couple hours the masks needed to be changed or they would allow the virus to have migrated through the material. The masks most people wear won’t be of use then, because there is no way most of them are changing masks to new ones every couple hours.

[Harmonious_Discord]

@AskNott

Well, I gotta say, I was embarrassed. Why weren’t they more clear? I went to the supermarket, and a few people were wearing little blue or white patches of cloth that cover their noses and mouths. I was the only one in the whole store in a Spider-Man® mask.

Maybe I’ll get the piggy-fu, but I took off the mask before I got to the produce section.:smack:

Now you sound like the parents that don’t want there kids vaccinated. Everybody else is protected so I can’t get it.

[DSeid]

@Harmonious_Discord

The doctors on the television news said that after a couple hours the masks needed to be changed or they would allow the virus to have migrated through the material. The masks most people wear won’t be of use then, because there is no way most of them are changing masks to new ones every couple hours.

That’s nice that they said that, and indeed the conventional in-hospital advice is to change masks once they get moist or between patient rooms with droplet precautions, but there really is no actual data on this. The advice is to no small degree made on what makes sense to people. A dry mask is likely a better filter for droplets than a moist one and any mask is likely a better filter than no mask at all.