During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, posters developed by the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing and UNSW were placed in high traffic areas. They focused on: (1) encouraging faculty, staff and students to stay at home if symptomatic (i.e. with a fever, cough, and runny nose) and to protect each other; (2) cough/sneeze etiquette (i.e. "cover your mouth and nose when you cough and sneeze" and "dispose of used tissues in the bin) (3) hand hygiene (i.e. "Wash your hands properly and regularly"). Our participants considered regular hand washing, cough etiquette (covering mouth and nose when coughing or sneezing), and avoiding the sick as good strategies to prevent infection. During the early and peak pandemic periods, hand washing was found to be the most accepted intervention among university students in Hong Kong [22] , Korea [23] , United States [24] and Australia [10] . Young people such as our university students may be more amenable to hand hygiene as a strategy because of a number of reasons. Firstly, these practices are community learnt and represent actions that the person has been encouraged to carry out from a young age. Secondly, hygiene-based measures pose minimal disruptions to daily routine. However, this is just a hypothesis and was not explored in depth in the study.