When flu goes to school.....

In an interesting article now out in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, University of Pittsburgh researchers model various school closure strategies for control of influenza epidemics. Interestingly, the models they ran suggest that only very long (8-week) school closures are effective at blunting and delaying the peak of an epidemic. Shorter (e.g. 2-week) closures may even prolong an epidemic by releasing a large number of "susceptibles" into the population during the epidemic peak.

Also, Happy New Year!