Study finds it's much easier to catch the flu than previously realized
Aside from getting vaccinated (which everyone should), an important strategy to evading the flu is regularly washing your hands and avoiding contact with the sneezes, coughs, and snot of sick people. The logic behind this simple advice is that the influenza virus requires reasonably close contact with the fluids of a plainly sick person in order to jump into its next victim. But a recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that you can catch it by just inhaling someone else’s infected breath. Researchers at the University of Maryland and elsewhere performed a surprisingly novel experiment and discovered excess of infectious viral particles in the breath of sick volunteers showing that airborne transmission of the flu virus was much more likely that previously known.