Fact About Surgical Masks For Swine Flu Protection

When the SARS epidemic spread, a lot of people adopted wearing masks that soon became the fashion. Now, when we have the swine flu epidemic, the same fashion is making a rebound. Everywhere, people are steadily adopting the wear of surgical masks under the misconception that it will protect them against swine flu.

Here are some facts about surgical masks for swine flu protection.

But what they are blissfully unaware of is that wearing a mask -- be it a surgical mask or an N95 mask -- is not going to completely protect them against getting the flu or the virus. The virus that causes swine flu is a very small organism that can very well be floating around in the air too. This infection, the swine flu, mainly spreads via touch. Then next mode via which the flu spreads is by the droplets that are thrown into the air when an infected person either sneezes or coughs.

Wearing a surgical mask can protect only so much from the larger droplets while someone coughs or sneezes. It is not fine enough to filter out both the virus itself as well as smaller droplets. Only when some flu-sick person directly sneezes or coughs in the face, does the surgical mask come handy. Of course, if a person is not one to frequently wash his hands, a surgical mask does come handy to keep the hand constantly coming in touch with the face, thereby avoiding the virus, if present in the hand to enter the body via the mouth or nose.

Surgical masks are not as effective as respirators or N95 masks, which are finer than the surgical ones.

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Fact About Surgical Masks For Swine Flu Protection