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REFILE: Face masks curb in-home spread of the flu: study
18 February 2009

By Anne Harding

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Donning a face mask could help prevent the flu from spreading within households, new research from Australia hints.

Adults who consistently wore a mask after a child living with them came down with respiratory illness were four times more likely to be protected from getting sick themselves than study participants who hadn't been assigned to wear a mask, Dr. Raina MacIntyre of the University of New South Wales in Sydney and her colleagues found.

But just 21 percent of the adults in the mask-wearing groups reported using them "often or always" for the amount of time recommended to protect them.

"Wearing a mask is cheap and simple, and should be practical for families," MacIntyre told Reuters Health. "It does not require a visit to the doctor or a prescription; families can purchase masks from the pharmacy."

"Some people may find them inconvenient or uncomfortable," MacIntyre admitted, "but it's a matter of weighing up the short-term inconvenience of wearing a mask versus the inconvenience of falling sick and having to take time off work."

MacIntyre and colleagues studied the effectiveness of face masks for preventing the spread of respiratory illness in 145 families among men and women aged 16 and older. All were living with a child aged 15 or younger who had recently sought treatment for fever and cough or sore throat.

The adults were randomly assigned to wear a common surgical mask; the more complicated and expensive P2 mask, which includes a respirator and is designed to filter out small particles; or no mask.

Lab tests confirmed respiratory viruses in nearly two-thirds of the children.

Among people who wore the masks as instructed, the risk of getting sick was 74 percent lower compared to the non-mask wearing group. The study was too small to determine if one type of mask was more effective than the other.

But getting people to wear them may be a challenge. On the first day of the study, 38 percent of the adults assigned to wear surgical masks reported wearing them most or all of the time, as did 46 percent of the P2 mask users. But by the fifth day, only 31 percent of the surgical mask group and 25 percent of P2 mask group were wearing them most or all of the time.

The most common reason people cited for not using the mask was discomfort; some said their children didn't want them to wear the mask, while others said they forgot to wear it.

The finding that face masks help curb the spread of flu and other respiratory illnesses within households has implications beyond the home front, especially in the case of an outbreak of serious respiratory illness, MacIntyre noted.

"It is important to realise that drugs and vaccines are not necessarily a panacea for infectious disease outbreaks. In some cases, like SARS, there may be no drugs or vaccines at all, and in a pandemic there will almost certainly be delays and shortages in supplies," the researcher said. "As such, we do need to look at the simple, non-pharmaceutical measures such as masks and hand washing that can provide effective protection to people."

SOURCE: Emerging Infectious Diseases, February 2009.

  • "I would describe flu as something that makes you feel very, very ill. You get a headache, aching bones, and are generally fed up"
  • "When I get flu symptoms I feel like a train has run over me"
  • "I felt very sick and, during the first week, I had high temperature. Flu was very different to a cold. I went back to work after two and a half weeks. Then I suffered a setback for another week"
  • "I run a guesthouse; flu would be a real pest for me. I couldn’t cook, I shouldn’t cook, and I wouldn’t cook, so I would need to get a lot of extra help in. It would cost me a lot more money. So flu’s a real problem, a right downturn"
  • "I work on my own and when I can’t work, I have to try not to infect my little children, so they avoid getting the flu as well"
  • "I feel a little numb, like I’m in another dimension. Because in general I have sore throat, headache, I feel all clogged-up. Usually a sensation like I’m floating in the air"
  • "Shivers, sweats, makes you ache. Last time I had flu I was off for two weeks"
  • "I think that I would probably be concerned that I would pass flu onto my children, who might not be able to deal with it as well as I would"
  • "Flu makes you feel like you’ve been hit over the head with a baseball bat. You don’t feel like you can get yourself out of bed as all your energy is drawn from you"
  • "I was incapable of working. It just wasn’t possible at all… and my flu dragged on for more than a week"
  • "I have no strength. It annoys me because I can do nothing, it seems like I’m wasting my time"
  • "Flu’s like being hit by a truck because you feel completely gone. There is no energy left in your body. You are suffering from high temperature. You’re sweating a lot and you feel really unwell"
  • "First of all infinite tiredness, then I feel like sleeping and don’t want to eat"
  • "I felt really miserable because my muscles and my bones were aching. Well, I can hardly describe it, I just felt really awful, absolutely miserable"
  • "It’s like there’s something huge treading on your head, like a deafening noise that destroys the eardrums"
  • "The fever was constantly rising – I immediately measured my temperature as soon as I got home. It was 41°C and it kept rising and I was wondering what’s going on. I was really scared! Everything was hurting and it all happened so fast. Flu came out of the blue"
  • "I always feel like my limbs have iron weights tied to them and I’m going to fall over any minute, a really stuffy runny nose and feel antisocial"
  • "I was totally dependent on others! I was incapable of doing anything at all"
  • "The real flu knocks you for six – you just don’t want to move or do anything. It’s not very nice"
  • "Not being able to go to work. Not being able to do the things I have to do at home and the commitments that I have day by day"