An outbreak of highly contagious Norovirus has been detected in the cardiac ward at the Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital.
Six heart patients have tested positive to the virus and test results are pending on two other patients.
The hospital’s executive director of medical services, Andrew Hallahan, said five planned elective surgery procedures had been rescheduled because the cardiac ward was not admitting new patients until infectious disease specialists advised it was safe to do so.
Viruses are fascinating. A 27nm particle first isolated in 1978 from the poop of ill students and teachers at a Norwalk, Ohio school causes millions of illnesses a year by using a host’s cells to make more viruses.
And spread them to other hosts through projectile vomit and explosive diarrhea.
Sort of like what’s happening in Corunna, Michigan where 30 patrons of an Applebee’s are, according to MLive, sick with noro symptoms.
The Shiawassee County Health Department confirmed the virus was responsible after a person became ill during the investigation period of March 9-12. The transmission source has not yet been identified.
“As of start of business day on March 22, 2016, a total of thirty people experienced similar symptoms and have contacted the Shiawassee County Health Department,” reads a statement from the health department’s Personal Health Services Division.
A call for comment from the restaurant was not immediately returned.
Nicole Greenway, director of personal community health for the Shiawassee County Health Department, said the restaurant is cooperating with the investigation and has fully sanitized the kitchen, bathroom and customer dining areas.
“We were notified by a person from the state who’d seen a complaint and we followed up on that,” she said, of the March 14 notification.
“Unfortunately it goes around, it’s very contagious,” said Greenway, referencing a recent norovirus outbreak at the University of Michigan that led to more than 100 people getting ill. “You can get it from touching a door handle or something like that. One public health message is to watch your hands. That’s a good prevention (tip).”
In late 2014, a gastroenteritis outbreak occurred in a school in Shandong Province, eastern China. Hundreds of individuals developed the symptoms of diarrhea and vomiting.
Epidemiological investigation showed that food consumption was not linked to this outbreak, and unboiled direct drinking water was identified as the independent risk factor with a relative risk of 1·37 (95% confidence interval 1·03–1·83). Furthermore, examination of common bacterial and viral gastroenteritis pathogens was conducted on different specimens. Norovirus GI.1, GI.2, GI.6, GII.4, GII.6 and GII.13 were detected in clinical specimens and a water sample. GII.4 sequences between clinical specimens and the water sample displayed a close relationship and belonged to GII.4 variant Sydney 2012.
These results indicate that direct drinking water contaminated by norovirus was responsible for this gastroenteritis outbreak. This study enriches our knowledge of waterborne norovirus outbreaks in China, and presents valuable prevention and control practices for policy-makers. In future, strengthened surveillance and supervision of direct drinking-water systems is needed.
A waterborne norovirus gastroenteritis outbreak in a school, eastern China
Epidemiology and Infection, 144, pp 1212-1219
Zhou, H. Zhang, X. Lin, P. Hou, S. Wang, Z. Tao, Z. Bi and A. Xu
Hundreds of travelers struck down by gastro on a south pacific cruise have docked in Melbourne.
Passengers on the Princess Cruises’ Golden Princess were grateful to hit dry land today, after the 14-day cruise of Vanuatu and New Caledonia.
The outbreak comes a month after 158 Sydney-bound passengers became sick on sister ship Diamond Princess.
Kerry McNamara from Barwon Heads said she managed to escape a bout of gastro — with sick passengers quarantine in their rooms — but was hit with the flu.
She estimated that the number of people ill could have hit 300.
“At one stage one of my roommates vomited on her bed and it took three hours to get the sheets changed.”
An elderly man also died of natural causes while on the cruise.
Mrs McNamara said passengers became concerned when “stretcher calls” were made across the 14 days.
Princess Cruises spokesman David Jones refused to release how many passengers had become sick.
The Rhode Island Department of Health is investigating Wright’s Farm Restaurant in Burrillville, R.I., NBC 10 News has learned.
Approximately 30 people became ill with gastrointestinal symptoms after eating at the popular restaurant on Sunday, according to the Health Department. Some of those students include members of Bryant University’s men’s lacrosse team.
The team was originally scheduled to be play on Tuesday, March 15 against Siena, but the game was postponed due to a stomach virus they announced.
“Based on their symptoms, we believe it to be norovirus, but we don’t have test results back yet,” Joseph Wendelken, a spokesperson for the Health Department told NBC 10 news.
Denise Senosk of Brookfield, Mass. and 12 other family members, who were at the restaurant as the same time as the Bryant lacrosse team, ate the chicken dinner at Wright’s on Sunday. Unfortunately, eight of the 13 people became ill, she told NBC 10 News.
Nothing was out of the ordinary with the food that she noticed, but she said a little boy vomited not far from where they were sitting in the restaurant.
Food Safety Talk, a bi-weekly podcast for food safety nerds, by food safety nerds. The podcast is hosted by Ben Chapman and barfblog contributor Don Schaffner, Extension Specialist in Food Science and Professor at Rutgers University. Every two weeks or so, Ben and Don get together virtually and talk for about an hour.
They talk about what’s on their minds or in the news regarding food safety, and popular culture. They strive to be relevant, funny and informative — sometimes they succeed. You can download the audio recordings right from the website, or subscribe using iTunes.
Episode 95 can be found here and on iTunes.
Show notes so you can follow along at home:
Chipotle by the numbers:
Over 490 illnesses linked to 6 outbreaks in 6 months.
1 fired manager and 1 fired food handler
Almost 2000 sites closed for 4 hours to change their food safety culture
3 Billerica Chipotle employees with norovirus
And, according to Reuters, the co-CEO’s 2015 compensation cut over 50% to about $13 million
Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc’s (CMG.N) co-chief executive officers’ total compensation more than halved in 2015, a year when the one-time Wall Street darling lost flavor following a series of food-borne illnesses linked to its restaurants.
Founder and co-Chief Executive Steve Ells’ total compensation fell 52 percent to $13.8 million, from a year earlier, according to a regulatory filing on Friday.
More than 600 pupils have been kept at home today after a sickness bug broke out at Oakfield Community Primary School in Dartford.
The school has been struck by the norovirus, which causes severe vomiting and diarrohoea, leaving more than 85% of the school’s 700 pupils at home. More than 100 children fell ill.
Parents were encouraged to keep their children at home today and the school will be subject to a deep clean over the weekend.
Executive head Garry Ratcliffe said: “We have had higher levels of absence than normal during the week and it came to a head yesterday when we had over 100 children absent.
Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc received praise for its handling of potential Norovirus infections at a Boston-area restaurant, as sick employees stayed home and the burrito chain quickly cleaned the restaurant.
Shares of Chipotle fell as much as 6.1 percent early, then gained back some ground after the head of the Billerica, Massachusetts public health department said the restaurant was cleaned and would reopen on Thursday. The stock closed down 3.4 percent at $506.63.
Reuters caught up with me at the Brisbane airport as me and the fam were about to leave for a 3-week tour of North America.
The closure of the Chipotle in the Boston suburb was seen as a partial test of a new food safety system rolled out after a series of illnesses hit the fresh burrito chain last year.
That workers stayed home in particular was a good sign, said Doug Powell, publisher of the food safety site barfblog.com. “It is an indication that the system is working,” he said. But customers may focus only on the sickness, not the company response. For burrito fans, “It’s just – ooh, they’re barfing at Chipotle again,” Powell said.
The company response was not a test of new measures to ensure ingredients are safe and avoid E.coli, he added.
John Patriquin /Staff Photographer; Tuesday, 1/25/11. Danny Leon (on right) and Julia Calder (center) serve customers at Chipotle restaurant in South Portland.
Chipotle food scares last year include two E.coli outbreaks linked to its restaurants that sickened more than 50 people in 10 states, as well as separate outbreaks of norovirus, a highly contagious virus known as the “winter vomiting bug”, in Massachusetts and California that involved more than 350 diners.
Three employees are suspected to have norovirus in Billerica, the town’s Board of Health said. Earlier in the day, local Public Health Director Richard Berube told reporters that one of the three had been confirmed to have the virus.
Berube said Chipotle has been “very proactive” and remaining staff at the burrito restaurant would be screened for norovirus, he added.
Berube, the company and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health all said no customers were known to be sick.
“They did the right thing,” said Howard Penney, who covers the chain for Hedgeye Risk Management. However, he argued that Chipotle was still a “broken company” and that it would take years to return to its peak performance.
Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold said the company closed the restaurant after employees called in sick.
They have a way with language down on the islands.
According to The Daily Herald, the Norovirus outbreak at the Sonesta Maho Beach Resort and Casino in February was due to “external intrusion stimulated by cross- contamination,” and not a result of food or drinking water at the resort, Collective Prevention Services (CPS) said on Monday.
Some 200 tourists, who had arrived on the island from Canada around February 17, and an unspecified number of students who had been at the resort for a regional debating competition, soon after were affected by the outbreak. CPS released the information after completing its report on the outbreak.
CPS said the Resort noticed a sudden spike in guests complaining of mainly vomiting and a few cases also had diarrhea; affected were the Canadian tourists. The hotel’s consulting doctor was called in and guidelines were provided in connection with sanitation measures. After a dormant period of about a week, a sudden increase in gastroenteritis was again noted amongst the overseas students, some of whom had checked-in on February 24, and the majority on February 25.
Treatment was provided by the hotel’s physician and at the St. Maarten Medical Center (SMMC). Various sanitation and preventive measures were re-emphasised.
“Because of the inherit aggressiveness of the norovirus, very hard and effective measures had to be implemented in the hotel according to the investigations and inspection results observed by government officials,” CPS said in a press release. “The intervention by hotel management and staff in the initial phase was well managed. It can be concluded based on the ministries investigation that this was not an outbreak originating in food or drinking water, but rather by external intrusion stimulated by cross-contamination.”