Squeaky-clean classrooms keep kids healthy - research

5:00AM Thursday June 05, 2008

Frequent use of alcohol-based hand sanitisers and a daily disinfectant wipedown of classroom surfaces can help reduce school absences caused by gastrointestinal illness, a study shows.

In classes where these infection-control measures were used, 16 per cent of the students were off sick for one day or more because of stomach problems over eight weeks, compared with 24 per cent of children in classes that did not use them, Dr Thomas J. Sandora, of Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, and colleagues report in the current issue of Pediatrics.

"These are very simple and relatively low-cost kinds of things," Dr Sandora said.

"Anything a school can do to prevent the exposure to these kinds of germs can keep kids healthier and in school."

He and his colleagues randomly assigned 285 third-to-fifth-graders in 15 classrooms to an intervention or a comparison, or "control", group.

In the infection-control intervention group, teachers were given alcohol-based hand sanitisers and asked the students to use them before and after lunch, after using the toilets - where they were instructed to wash their hands with soap and water - and after being exposed to "potentially infectious secretions", for example a toy that another student had placed in his or her mouth.

Teachers also wiped students' desks with disinfectant wipes containing quaternary ammonium chloride every day after lunch.

The control group was asked to follow the usual cleaning and hand-washing practices.

The Clorox company provided the wipes and hand sanitiser used in the study, as well as money for the research, but was not involved in analysing the research.

In the intervention classrooms, 9 per cent of samples taken from the children's desks came back positive for norovirus, a frequent cause of gastrointestinal infections, compared with 29 per cent of samples in the control group classrooms.

As well as having fewer absences, the infection-control group had fewer total days out of the classroom.

But there was no difference between the groups in the percentage of students who missed school due to respiratory illness.

This was probably because such infections spread more easily than stomach bugs, and would require a level of hand-hygiene vigilance difficult to sustain throughout the course of a busy school day, Dr Sandora said.

"The main message for parents is that hand-washing is the best way to prevent the spread of infection - that's been known for a long time."

Hand sanitisers were useful in situations where there was no access to a sink, he said.

Disinfecting household surfaces might also help to prevent family members getting sick.

The study concludes: "Schools should consider incorporating these simple infection-control interventions in the classroom to reduce the number of days lost caused by common illnesses."

- REUTERS

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