Norovirus is almost impossible to stop - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Disinfection is back.
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“Bleach is my friend right now,” says Annette Cameron, a pediatrician at Yale School of Medicine, who spent the first half of this week spraying and sloshing the potent chemical all over her home. It’s one of the few tools she has to combat norovirus, the nasty gut pathogen that her 15-year-old son was recently shedding in gobs.
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norovirus has seeded outbreaks in several countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Last week, the U.K. Health Security Agency announced that laboratory reports of the virus had risen to levels 66 percent higher than what’s typical this time of year. Especially hard-hit are Brits 65 and older, who are falling ill at rates that “haven’t been seen in over a decade.”
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this is more a nauseating nuisance than a public-health crisis. In most people, norovirus triggers, at most, a few miserable days of GI distress that can include vomiting, diarrhea, and fevers, then resolves on its own; the keys are to stay hydrated and avoid spreading it to anyone vulnerabl
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the virus is far more deadly in parts of the world with limited access to sanitation and potable water.
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Still, fighting norovirus isn’t easy, as plenty of parents can attest. The pathogen, which prompts the body to expel infectious material from both ends of the digestive tract, is seriously gross and frustratingly hardy. Even the old COVID standby, a spritz of hand sanitizer, doesn’t work against it—the virus is encased in a tough protein shell that makes it insensitive to alcohol.
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At an extreme, a single gram of feces—roughly the heft of a jelly bean—could contain as many as 5.5 billion infectious doses, enough to send the entire population of Eurasia sprinting for the toilet.
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norovirus mainly targets the gut, and spreads especially well when people swallow viral particles that have been released in someone else’s vomit or stool.
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direct contact with those substances, or the food or water they contaminate, may not even be necessary: Sometimes people vomit with such force that the virus gets aerosolized; toilets, especially lidless ones, can send out plumes of infection
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If the spittle finding holds for humans, then talking, singing, and laughing in close proximity could be risky too.
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Once emitted into the environment, norovirus particles can persist on surfaces for days—making frequent hand-washing and surface disinfection key measures to prevent spread
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Handshakes and shared meals tend to get dicey during outbreaks, along with frequently touched items such as utensils, door handles, and phones.
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One 2012 study pointed to a woven plastic grocery bag as the source of a small outbreak among a group of teenage soccer players; the bag had just been sitting in a bathroom used by one of the girls when she fell sick the night before.
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Once a norovirus transmission chain begins, it can be very difficult to break. The virus can spread before symptoms start, and then for more than a week after they resolve
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Once the virus arrives, the entire family is almost sure to be infected. Baldridge, who has two young children, told me that her household has weathered at least four bouts of norovirus in the past several years.
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Roughly 20 percent of European populations, for instance, are genetically resistant to common norovirus strains. “So you can hope,” Frenck told me. For the rest of us, it comes down to hygiene
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Altan-Bonnet recommends diligent hand-washing, plus masking to ward off droplet-borne virus. Sick people should isolate themselves if they can. “And keep your saliva to yourself,” she told me.
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The family fastidiously scrubbed their hands with hot water and soap, donned disposable gloves when touching shared surfaces, and took advantage of the virus’s susceptibility to harsh chemicals and heat. When her son threw up on the floor, Cameron sprayed it down with bleach; when he vomited on his quilt, she blasted it twice in the washing machine on the sanitizing setting, then put it through the dryer at a super high temp
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After three years of COVID, the world has gotten used to thinking about infections in terms of airways. “We need to recalibrate,” Bhumbra told me, “and remember that other things exist.”