By Allison Hydzik
With flu running rampant across many parts of the United States, a
frequently asked question is, “How do you prevent the spread of flu among
children?”
Researchers at the
University of Pittsburgh and the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health are currently investigating how the flu
spreads in schools, based on how children interact with each other. And you can
help by participating in a
brief
online survey – no matter your age – and be entered into a weekly drawing
for an Amazon or iTunes gift card.
The
Social Mixing And Respiratory Transmission in Schools (SMART) study
is looking at how the flu and other respiratory diseases are spread in schools
by measuring how often children come in contact with each other in and out of
school. The researchers will use the data to construct models of school
children’s daily interactions so they can develop the most effective preventive
measures.
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Shanta Zimmer, M.D. |
“Mathematical models like this can help policymakers and health care
providers manage new infectious disease outbreaks. However, these models demand
precise empirical estimates of critical factors such as average contact
patterns,” said
Shanta Zimmer, M.D., SMART co-principal investigator and
associate professor of medicine at Pitt’s School of Medicine. “The SMART study
will provide key information about mixing rates and patterns of encounters
relevant to the spread of infections that will help us determine the efficacy
of a proposed control intervention, or where best to target limited
prophylactic resources.”
To learn about people’s daily contact patterns, the researchers are
asking people to take their survey, which is anonymous, open to any resident of
the United States and takes 15 to 45 minutes to complete. The information
collected will allow researchers to refine models of infectious disease
transmission and seek better methods of disease prevention and control.