SCIENCE - washingtonpost.com

SCIENCE - washingtonpost.com: "

A long-awaited analysis of the experience of 43 U.S. cities, published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, disputes the conventional wisdom that neither communities nor individuals could have done much to alter the deadly march of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. The study found that U.S. cities that closed schools, banned public gatherings, isolated flu patients and quarantined people exposed to them suffered less than cities that did not do those things. These 'non-pharmaceutical interventions' acted like drugs. The sooner they were taken, the higher the dose used and the longer the treatment, the better a city did."

Comment: Big surprise! Public health measures work. Still this is an important result given that a new flu epidemic is probably going to occur soon, and many countries would be able to use these older techniques effectively when it does. JAD