Mandated sanitizer sharing for AMEDD soldiers - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Mandated sanitizer sharing for AMEDD soldiers

Need some hand sanitizer? Look no further than the nearest health-services soldier. They’ll share a squirt — or give you the whole bottle — under a new Army policy.

Every Army Medical Department active-duty soldier and Reserve-component soldier on active duty must carry at all times two bottles of sanitizer: one for the soldier’s use and the second to share.

The new policy, announced in an All-Army Activities Message, is aimed squarely at the H1N1 flu virus.

“We’re trying to do anything we can to reduce or prevent the spread of the infection,” said Col. Scott Stanek, the deputy functional proponent for preventive medicine with the Office of the Army Surgeon General.

The new policy will affect about 60,000 AMEDD soldiers, said Col. Edmund Haraguchi, director of logistics for the Office of the Army Surgeon General.

The plan is to initially supply each soldier with two bottles of sanitizer, each averaging about 2 ounces.

The cost for the initial supply is $270,000, Haraguchi said, and more sanitizer will be made available.

While hand sanitizer already is in use in Iraq and Afghanistan, additional shipments to AMEDD soldiers are likely to hit the war zones within the coming weeks, Haraguchi said.

Soap and water is preferred, Stanek said, and hand sanitizer is the next best thing. The advice: Use it after a cough or sneeze, or whenever you feel you may have encountered germs.

The Defense Department, meanwhile, is moving forward with mandatory vaccinations for seasonal flu and H1N1 for all military personnel. Vaccine doses will be distributed in the coming weeks, with the first vaccines available to deployed personnel, all health-care workers assigned to military medical treatment facilities, and bases receiving new soldiers such as basic training installations and service academies.

As of Oct. 25, the World Health Organization tallied more than 440,000 laboratory-confirmed cases of H1N1 and more than 5,700 deaths.

The Army reports 2,033 cases of H1N1 in active-duty soldiers since April, based on confirmations from the Army’s military treatment facilities.