The New Mexican reports more than 30 top scientists attending a symposium in Santa Fe earlier this month were sickened in an outbreak of Norovirus.

The conference at the Hilton Santa Fe Historic Plaza hotel drew 251 people, including participants from the University of California-Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as various prestigious biomedical research centers here and abroad.

And unfortunately between 30 and 40 of them experienced sudden bouts of vomiting, diarrhea and stomach cramps, according to the state health department.

One person went to the hospital, another to urgent care, but no one was hospitalized and nobody had complications.

The cause is undetermined and might remain so, said David Selvage, bureau chief for the Infectious Disease Epidemiology Bureau.

Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology, which hosted the event, is a nonprofit that convenes peer-reviewed conferences across a range of life sciences. It’s a regular visitor to Santa Fe and plans other conferences in the city later this year and in 2017. The one that opened May 2 was titled “Epigenetic and Metabolic Regulation of Aging and Aging-Related Diseases.”

The Hilton notified the health department and took immediate precautions by ordering in food for the symposium from outside vendors, even though there was no determination that the source of the norovirus was the hotel kitchen.

“They really wanted to do the right thing and did,” Selvage said.

In fact, because there were no other complaints from other hotel guests, Selvage suspects the origin was something else — person-to-person transmission or a food item shared by many people at the symposium. “If it was a food handler, you would expect other groups attending events there to become ill and we didn’t see that,” he said.

The health department, he said, collected three specimens from people attending the conference and the state lab reported May 10 that all were positive for norovirus.

The state lab does not have a test for determining the presence of norovirus in food.