Why the study?
Do public health interventions including school closure and hygiene campaigns reduce HFMD transmission?
Do public health interventions including school closure and hygiene campaigns reduce HFMD transmission?
Public health interventions, including school closures and hygiene campaigns, significantly reduced HFMD transmission during the 2003 and 2009 outbreaks.
Public health measures may curb HFMD outbreaks; leaves open need for randomized trials to guide practice.
We evaluated the effect of public health interventions including territory-wide school closure and hygiene campaigns during 2003 and 2009 in reducing hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD). We compared the observed and projected HFMD consultation rates among sentinel general practitioners using a decomposition regression model. Public health measures were effective in reducing HFMD by 57.2% (95% CI: 53.0%-60.7%) and 26.7% (95% CI: 19.5%-32.7%) in 2003 and 2009, respectively.
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Ma et al. (2011) studied this question.