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IIRC, In Sundarban Delta (India/Bangladesh) people put on masks on the back of the head for similar reasons.

EDIT: Yeap, here's NYT article from 1989 https://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/05/science/face-masks-fool-t...

This reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes comic where Calvin, having read about this practice, makes his own mask to protect himself from Hobbes' pouncing.

[1] https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/10/23

That's cool. The comic was about one year after the newspaper, so perhaps it got into the public consciousness during that period!

The outcome of Calvin's "experiment"

Apparently putting on a mask at the back of the head stopped working after a while https://books.google.com/books?id=zU7PmIjthpoC&pg=PA38#v=one...

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