Classroom door handles. Vending machine buttons. Computer lab keyboards.

On a college campus, scores of students and staff leave their germs on communal surfaces every day.

That's why colleges around Florida and the country are taking extreme measures to deal with the H1N1 influenza, or swine flu.

Quarantine rooms, information campaigns and vaccinations figure in most of their strategies. But one college in upstate New York -- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute -- has gone so far as to ban drinking games, citing the danger of sharing cups during games such as beer pong.

Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts is promising to send infected students home by private car if they live within 250 miles. Penn State is delivering boxed meals to sick students' rooms.

Closer to home, Florida's Eckerd College is offering to move sick students' roommates to other dorm rooms or possibly hotels, and St. Thomas University in Miami has set aside isolation spaces in rooms cooled individually, rather than through central air conditioning.

``If we had to put someone there, we would have their meals brought up to them,'' said Beatriz Robinson, the school's vice president of Planning, Enrollment and Student Affairs.

RELAXING RULES

College-age students are more vulnerable to swine flu than to regular winter flu, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And they don't always see doctors or get vaccinations.

Many schools are keeping a close eye out for any signs of flu-like symptoms, such as fever, chills, muscle pains and sore throat.

``Our student health service has had training for influenza surveillance, looking specifically for certain symptoms,'' said Dr. James Howell, a professor of public health at Nova Southeastern University in Davie.

Colleges are also willing to relax attendance policies for students or staff that catch the disease.

``A provost sent out a letter to all the professors so they understand what's happening when working with students who may have H1N1,'' said Dr. Oscar Loynaz, interim health services director at Florida International University.

None of these schools, however, has had to deal with the problem on the same kind of scale as big state colleges such as Florida State University, which has approximately 40,000 students.

With dorm occupancy at 100 percent, FSU can't isolate infected students.

According to FSU student health services director Leslie Sacher, the university was recently seeing close to 40 cases of influenza per day, though that number has tapered off.

``We began to track upper respiratory infection separately because we wanted to be able to reassure people that we're looking at both things,'' she said, adding that FSU's recent flu spate began with teens taking summer programs at the school.

STADIUM CONTROL

Well known for its athletics program, FSU has tackled the problem of swine flu possibly moving through crowds of unsuspecting sports fans.

Staffers have installed hand-sanitizing dispensers in all bathrooms and many entrances and exits to the Seminoles' stadium. We also mandated that vendors had to bring ``a half-gallon of sanitizer to keep their display surfaces clean,'' Sacher said.

Whether or not they've seen swine flu cases, nearly all schools have launched campaigns to educate students on how to keep from getting sick.

``We had a town hall meeting at our north campus where we had over 250 students show up,'' said Scott Burnotes, director of emergency preparedness at MDC. ``They asked good questions and took it seriously.''

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