Creswell residents take precautions as swine flu hits home
August 28, 2009 by DALLAS DUNCAN
Filed under News
Two Creswell residents have been sent home due to swine flu-like symptoms.
Sydney Rubin, a freshman from Woodstock, said in an interview Thursday that she and her hallmates received an e-mail from their Resident Assistant informing them someone on their hall had contracted the virus.
“Immediately everyone’s doors [opened] and you just smelled Lysol in the hallway,” she said.
The e-mail asked for residents to “be aware [that] this flu is spreading through campus, and if you catch it you will be asked to leave UGA and go home to recover.”
It also advised residents to wash their hands, keep their rooms clean and, “most importantly, if you are experiencing flu-like symptoms, go to the health services and get checked immediately.”
Rubin said people were wiping down door handles and even cleaning their air conditioning vents in an effort to sanitize their dorm rooms.
“We kind of quarantined ourselves,” she said.
Kaylee Simon, a freshman from Marietta, said she knew of girls who had been sent home with swine flu and could not return for two weeks.
Simon said academics were her main concern with the illness.
“I just don’t want to miss school or be out for two weeks,” she said in an interview Thursday, “but I’m not worried about getting it.”
Simon said she had not seen any influenza campaign posters.
Emily Anderson, a freshman from Lawrenceville, said she and her roommate, Sarah Wigton, were using Lysol and hand sanitizer to keep H1N1 at bay.
“And Febreeze,” Anderson said, “but not in the hallways, because it will set off the fire alarms.”
Wigton, a freshman from Conyers, said the situation “was kind of scary at first,” but that she was trying to look at the humorous side of things.
Yasmeen Malik, a freshman from Atlanta, said her hall “has been deemed the swine flu hall.”
“All the girls on my hall have been really paranoid,” she said Thursday. “We’ve been Germ-Xing and trying not to touch door handles and stuff.”
Malik said she feels bad for the roommates of the sick girls.
“They’re the ones left with the quarantined rooms,” she said.
But it’s not just Creswell seeing the effects of the virus.
“There’s a girl in the pledge class for my sorority [with H1N1], and they had a meeting and said they had to disinfect every room she went in,” Anderson said.
Malik said she took one of her friends to the University Health Center earlier this week. Her friend had been complaining of flu-like symptoms.
“While I was sitting with her, I was thinking I might get [H1N1] from her because I was sitting with her on the bus and feeling her forehead,” she said. “I was concerned about it, but I think I’ll be OK.”
Malik said there were about 20 people in the waiting room, so she and her friend did not see a doctor until about two hours after their appointment time was scheduled.
“They’d run out of flu tests or flu kits,” she said, “so they did rapid strep and mono tests and when those came back negative they told her she had swine flu.”
Her friend was sent home, and Malik came back to Creswell wearing a surgical mask, which now hangs on her bulletin board.
“[My roommate] was like, ‘did you pick up something? Don’t cough on me!’” Malik said.
But the University’s concern with the virus does not end with its Athens campus, as Cooperative Extension agents reach out to elementary schools across the state with awareness programs.
Judy Ashley, the 4-H youth development coordinator for Walton County, helped to create and implement a program with an emphasis on hand-washing techniques that is geared toward grades K-5.
The lesson begins with a video showing the difference between proper and improper hand-washing. Proper washing, Ashley said, includes bringing paper towels down first to turn on the faucet instead of touching public surfaces.
The program also touches on proper ways to control sneezes and coughs, she said, and tells students to stay home if they have a fever.
Though the program is not geared specifically toward preventing H1N1, Ashley said, she does ask if the students are aware of any illness that has been on the news a lot lately.
“Most of them have heard of it,” she said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
“I explained to them that it is a different flu than we’ve ever seen,” Ashley said, “but that doesn’t mean it’s more deadly, it just spreads faster and can infect more people at the same time. We want to dispel the myth that people who get it are going to die.”
Judy Harrison, a food and nutrition professor and extension food specialist in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, helped the Walton County Extension Agents come up with materials and lessons to use in their program, including Glitterbug Lotion.
“It’s purchased to use to teach hand-washing,” she said in a telephone interview Thursday. “It helps kids understand how much they have to rub their hands together and pay attention to their fingernails.”
Harrison said the lotion has “little particles in it that represent germs.”
Ashley said students put the lotion on and touch items such as pencils and shake each others’ hands. They then put their hands under a black light, which shows the transfer of the lotion’s particles onto other surfaces.
“It’s a demonstration of how germs transfer,” she said, adding the extension agents make sure to teach students the particles are not actually germs.
Ashley said they teach students to call it H1N1, not swine flu.
Harrison said this is because H1N1 is not a food safety issue, despite the popular name.
“Cooking – even if you had pork that was infected – would kill the virus,” she said.
J. Scott Angle, Dean of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, said these programs are a way to share research-based information to minimize the spread of disease.
“This is exactly why we have Cooperative Extension,” he said in a telephone interview Thursday, “to keep families happy, healthy and prosperous.”
