Dr. Regina Fleming-Magit, director of UC San Diego Student Health Services, anticipates an increase in numbers of students with flu symptoms.

Wash your hands. Cover your cough. Stay informed.

That’s the mantra as students return to class and the University of California campuses and medical centers prepare for a possible surge in H1N1 flu cases.

UC health and emergency operations officials have been developing plans to address H1N1, also known as swine flu, and will continue to adapt their responses at the campus and systemwide level as events evolve. For now, they are encouraging students, faculty and staff to practice good hygiene and minimize the spread of H1N1 while also taking steps to be ready for a flu outbreak.

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UC Irvine students in residence halls received colorful doorknob hangers to post if they get the flu.

All UC campuses are publicizing health guidelines and enacting measures to care for students who have flu symptoms.

Students who develop flu-like illnesses are urged to follow recommendations for preventing the spread of the virus by staying at home or in their dorm rooms until they are free of fever for 24 hours. However, at UC Riverside, dorm residents who get sick are being asked to leave campus and return home to their families if possible.

Students who are ill should keep away from others as much as possible to reduce the spread of the virus. If self-isolation is not feasible, another option is to use a large room or suite specifically for ill students with beds at least 6 feet apart and, if possible, with temporary barriers between beds and with bathroom facilities separate from those used by healthy students. Students with severe illness and those at high risk for complications from influenza are being told to contact student health services.

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Charles Chiu, director of UCSF's Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center

While the H1N1 virus certainly is tenacious, refusing to dwindle or go away, it has yet to prove more lethal than the regular seasonal flu.

But if the virus should do a Jekyll to Hyde, turning into a more monstrous bug, laboratory detectives like Charles Chiu will sound the alarm.

Chiu, an infectious disease expert who directs the University of California, San Francisco’s Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center, today studies strains of H1N1 to learn whether or not the virus is mutating into something more severe or deadly as it spreads into the population. That happened during the 1918 flu pandemic, when a flu virus possibly mutated and killed an estimated 20 million to 40 million people worldwide. Although there are no signs yet that H1N1 is changing, scientists are keeping a vigilant eye on the virus.

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