Posting signs and scattering bottles of hand sanitizer are not enough to make students practice good hygiene, even in the midst of a swine-flu pandemic, according to a study by researchers at North Carolina State University and Kansas State University.
College health officials who want students to change their habits must be creative, communicate through social-networking sites, and lose the scientific jargon and polite euphemisms, says Benjamin J. Chapman, an assistant professor of family and consumer sciences and a food-safety specialist at North Carolina State.
“For example,” he says, “don’t refer to something as a ‘gastrointestinal illness.’ Instead tell them, ‘This could make you puke,’ or ‘Dude, wash your hands.’”
The study, published in the September issue of the Journal of Environmental Health, was conducted during a suspected norovirus outbreak at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, in 2006. Mr. Chapman and one of his co-authors, Brae V. Surgeoner, were graduate students there. Ms. Surgeoner is now a food-safety researcher at Kansas State, where the third co-author, Douglas Powell, is an associate professor of diagnostic medicine and pathobiology, as well as an expert on food safety.
The virus that struck Guelph is highly contagious and causes diarrhea and vomiting. The researchers wanted to see whether students were complying with instructions that were plastered around the campus.
“We couldn’t follow students into the bathroom, because that leads to ethical problems,” Mr. Chapman says. So the researchers focused on whether students were using a plastic bottle of hand-sanitizing gel placed at the entrance of a cafeteria that had been described to them as “ground zero” of the outbreak.
Signs were posted to remind people to use the sanitizer, and campus officials were under the impression that many were using it. Mr. Chapman and his colleagues were unconvinced. As they watched from a discreet distance during a pair of two-hour sessions, they observed that only 17 percent of the students entering the cafeteria used the gel, even though 83 percent of those later polled said they routinely practiced all prescribed hand-hygiene practices during the outbreak.
“What people do and what they say with regard to hand hygiene are two different things,” Mr. Chapman reports.
He says health officials should aim their messages at specific audiences, such as students living in a particular residence hall. Instant messaging and other social-media tools should be used as well.
“It really hits home,” he notes, “when their classmates start changing their IM names to something like Puking Veronica.”
