Health roundup: Closing schools may help control flu

Your Wednesday morning health roundup:

Schools and flu: Closing schools during a bad flu outbreak may help control the spread of illness, a new study suggests. The study compared two Texas communities during the the H1N1 "swine" flu epidemic of 2009 and found fewer emergency room visits for flu, especially among kids, in the community that closed schools. At the time, skeptics said kids would just congregate in malls and other places and manage to spread the flu anyway. Not answered: whether the decline is worth the cost in lost work days for parents and lost educational time for kids. (Reuters)

Better bandages: Scientists in Boston have built a better bandage -- one that doesn't hurt when you take it off. The strong but easy-to-remove medical tape is especially important for people with delicate skin -- including premature babies -- who can lose skin and get scars from bandage removal. (TIME)

Weight and see: A weight loss program that spent weeks teaching participants strategies for maintaining weight loss before it asked them to lose a pound worked better than a conventional program in a new study. Women in both programs lost an average of 17 pounds, but the women who worked on maintenance first kept more pounds off. (WebMD)

Today's talker: A New York City Hospital that lost its back-up power during superstorm Sandy on Monday night managed to safely evacuate about 260 patients, CNN reports. The nurses at NYU Langone Medical Center who helped carry out patients, including four newborns on hand-operated airbags, are being hailed as heroes, even as questions remain about why the hospital's generators failed. And the New York Daily News reports that the outage did cause some casualties: thousands of mice used in medical research drowned in the hospital's basement.