After a norovirus outbreak hit an Oregon soccer team, leaving seven girls sick with vomiting and diarrhea, researchers determined the culprit was a reusable grocery bag.
They pieced together how the virus spread through the team in October 2010, and their findings yielded several lessons about this highly contagious and extremely unpleasant virus.
Don’t keep food in the bathroom: After the first girl became sick during an out-of-town soccer tournament, she spent the night in the chaperone’s room and used the bathroom continuously overnight. Unfortunately, that is where the chaperone stored the grocery bag filled with cookies, chips, fruit and other snacks that the girls ate the next day, according to Time magazine.
Norovirus can travel through the air: The first girl who got sick never touched the grocery bag, but investigators tested it and found copies of the strain of norovirus that sickened the soccer players. The experts say the viral particles likely floated through the air from the toilet to the bag.
"That certainly is an area of active research, involving the dynamics of vomiting, and how are particles dispersed when somebody vomits. There is a limited range, for sure, but exactly how far it is and what the level of risk is 10 feet away or 30 feet away. Certainly, in this case, it was plenty close to allow the virus to float over onto the bag," says Aron J. Hall, DVM, MSPH, of the CDC's division of viral diseases, says in a report by WebMD.
Clean everything – and that includes reusable grocery bags: In a norovirus outbreak, the CDC recommends cleaning everything with a solution containing five to 25 tablespoons of bleach per gallon of water.
"When cleaning an area after someone is ill, we need to not just be thinking about wiping down the toilet area. We need to think about the virus up in the air and landing on everything in that bathroom, and either throwing away or cleaning everything that was exposed," Kimberly K. Repp, an epidemiologist with Oregon Health and Sciences University, tells WebMD.
Epidemiologists are fascinated by strange things: The researchers published their findings this week in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. In an accompanying editorial, Hall notes that noroviruses “are perhaps the perfect human pathogens,” causing an estimated 21 million cases of acute gastroenteritis annually in the U.S. alone.
He says the investigation of this outbreak “provides a fascinating example of how a unique exposure and transmission scenario can result in a norovirus outbreak.”