A reusable grocery bag filled with snacks gives norovirus to girls soccer team

[alexmst]

Lesley Ciarula Taylor
Staff Reporter
Toronto Star

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/a...rge-of-cruise-ships-strikes-girls-soccer-team

A reusable grocery bag filled with snacks managed to capture and transmit a vicious stomach bug that sickened nearly half of a girl’s soccer team a day later, a U.S. public health investigation reveals.

“You don’t have to have direct contact with an ill person” to be infected with a norovirus, the swift and savage bug that can cause days of vomiting and diarrhea, said co-investigator Dr. Kimberly Repp.

In fact, the virus, a scourge of cruise ships and nursing homes, lived for two weeks after the girl’s bout of vomiting, Repp said.

Repp, of the Department of Public Health and Preventative Medicine at Oregon Health and Science University, and William Keene of the Oregon Public Health Division in Portland, traced the virus to a reusable open-topped grocery bag filled with snacks.

The bag sat in the bathroom of a hotel room through six hours of “very violent” vomiting by one 13-year-old Oregon girl who fell ill during a weekend soccer tournament in King County, Washington state, Repp said.

“The vomiting produces little particles, little droplets that are up in the air. They land on everything. A droplet will have two million viruses in it.”

The invisible particles embedded themselves on the bag and the packages of cookies, chips and grapes inside. A day later, the bag and snacks were passed around at lunch.

In all, nine of the girls and chaperones came down with the norovirus from that solitary exposure.

“It’s a really impressive pathogen,” said Repp.

Public health investigators managed to trace the norovirus after interviewing all 17 girls and four chaperones at the tournament.

“We couldn’t find anything except the cookies that they had in common. Some of the girls were at the lunch but didn’t eat any food from the bag. They didn’t get sick.”

The chaperone and the girl who was originally sick had left that morning but the bag of snacks remained behind.

“It was two full weeks” after the initial outbreak that public health investigators took a swab from the grocery bag, which another chaperone had in her kitchen. The pathogen was still alive.

Luckily, said Repp, the cleaning staff at the hotel had been alerted to the original sick girl and wore gloves when they disinfected the room and bathroom.

The investigation is published in the current Journal of Infectious Diseases.

 

[larry]

no surprise. i use new plastic bags at the supermarket. and i reuse them at home for garbage like everyone else. or to tie over my bike seat in the rain. this bag tax was just another loony idea that costs us a lot, creates problems and animosity at the checkout and doesn't actually do any good. but it makes some people feel better. like pictures on cigarette packs.

 

[oldjones]

'Everyone' where I shop brings their own bags, and the ravines and streets in my neighbourhood are the better looking for it. When I need 'garbage' bags I don't mind paying, and it's better than the self-deception, as with Air-Miles, that some generous merchant is giving us stuff 'free'.

I'm curious about the animosity at the checkout you mentioned larry, as I haven't seen any. What does that arise from?

As for the re-usable bag in the news item: It didn't make the virus, it just picked up what the infected owner deposited, as any disposable bag might have if the same person had handled it. And of course all that e. coli contaminated produce of recent years was in one-time packaging. It's the blind-faith that everything's safe that kills.

Any parent of my mother's generation would have been horrified at the unhygienic treatment of the 'food items' (there were grapes) in the tale. One never left things in their carriers, and always thoroughly washed everything that hadn't been sterilized by cooking.

What's that thing they say about Guns? That it's the bad people that kill, not the guns. Whatever truth that has certainly applies here.

 

[alexmst]

I agree with Larry that I also only re-use bags for garbage.

The bag tax was designed to reduce the amount of bags in landfill bu appealing to the miserly quality in the populace. If they charge you a nickle a bag, about half the people won't want to pay so they will re-use, which drops the amount of bags being handed out by half, which means fewer bags in landfill. Fine, so I do as I did before, only know I have to pay an extra tax on my behavior. I would never re-use plastic bags for food - too much risk of contamination. Eco-enthusiasts would say, yes, that is perhaps true, but use cloth bags and don't use plastic. Well, one has to remember to take cloth bags with one when one goes shopping, or else one ends up with a pile of 50 cloth bags filling one's closet. Besides, those can be contaminated too.

The best solution is to use brown paper bags for groceries. Use them once, then put them in the blue box for recycling. No plastic in landfills. No re-use so no cross-contamination. No fee as they are not plastic so the 5 cent rule doesn't apply. Good for the environment. They stand up better in the trunk of your car when full of food then the plastic bags that shift around and spill their contents during hard cornering. A win-win. At least one grocery store in Toronto has switched to these and I say "Good!" A simple idea from the 1960s that makes perfect sense. Brown paper bags for supermarket groceries. As long as they have a bagger loading my groceries into the bags for me at checkout, this is great.

 

[oldjones]

The story in today's paper stated that the bag, with its contents—including unwrapped fruit—remained in the bathroom for six hours while the sick-girl who brought it endured repeated bouts of extreme vomitting.

Again, remembering the sanitation lessons of childhood: Who eats food from the bathroom, ever? Never mind that the spread of aerosol-borne contaminants from ejection and from flushing must have been clearly audible to all the other girls. This story has zero to do with bags and everything to do with poor health education.

 

[Aardvark154]

The best solution is to use brown paper bags for groceries. Use them once, then put them in the blue box for recycling. No plastic in landfills. No re-use so no cross-contamination. No fee as they are not plastic so the 5 cent rule doesn't apply. Good for the environment. They stand up better in the trunk of your car when full of food then the plastic bags that shift around and spill their contents during hard cornering. A win-win. At least one grocery store in Toronto has switched to these and I say "Good!" A simple idea from the 1960s that makes perfect sense. Brown paper bags for supermarket groceries. As long as they have a bagger loading my groceries into the bags for me at checkout, this is great.

Good for starting fires for those of us who have fireplaces as well.


By the way I agree that is one impressive pathogen two weeks in the open air and still going!