Ligth blogging (and why)

Blogging will be light for the next day or so because the eventuality I feared most, that I would get the day care incubated norovirus-like illness that grandson #2 incubated, has come to pass. I had to cancel an extremely important trip to a scientific meeting in California. There is no hope I'd make it and I'd probably infect everyone on the plane t rows up and 5 rows back, not to mention my colleague I was going to share a room with. So I am super miserable and now my son-in-law is down with it and my daughter is feeling "seriously queasy." Mrs. R. is morosely waiting for the other shoe to drop and I am not going to go away and leave her to cope for herself.

So that's why there is nothing substantive in this post except the weary key tapping of a dehydrated and miserable blogger.

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So here's the deal. Grandson #2 picked up some kind of norovirus-like thing at daycare and by late afternoon was seriously engaged in projectile vomiting. My daughter and I picked him and his little 'bro up (his dad was in class) and brought them to her house. Since I am getting ready for a…
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There is no reason why a flu blogger-epidemiologist-physician's family should be immune to flu in the community. And it appears my family is not. My daughter has had a cough for the last few days and Friday night was suddenly seized by nausea, vomiting and fever. Her HMO's urgent care directed her…

Well dedicated you are Revere. Get the hell off the keyboard and enjoy those soap operas. The world can wait grandpa. Give it a rest for a day or so. I think I read Noro can be both knocked out a bit early by shooting the hell out of the PH in your stomach with extreme loads of OJ. May or may not be true, but it does keep you hydrated.

Rest up...forget this for a while.

By M.Randolph Kruger (not verified) on 08 Dec 2008 #permalink

Feel better soon!

I feel your pain. My last infection came from working as an agency nurse in a nursing
home one night. On day one in that facility, six rooms in one hallway had patients
with diarrhea. I assisted another nurse with irrigating a urinary catheter in one of those rooms. We wore gloves, and scrubbed meticulously before and afterwards. Forty eight hours later, I woke up abruptly with both vomiting and diarrhea. I was careful not to
drink the water or use ice cubes from their ice machine or to eat anything from that
place. Any chance that this could be aerosolized? I always wondered about that.
Every department in that nursing home , social workers to cleaning staff,
administration to dietary had sick workers. It was the same in every nursing home throughout the area.

Indigo: aerosolized droplet ("airborne") transmission is possible, perhaps even common, in crowded environments and among secondary cases. It is facilitated by the presence of virus in vomitus (as well as stool) and particularly by the extremely low infectious dose of noroviruses. In an outbreak among patrons of a restaurant where a single diner vomited (on the floor) during a meal, the attack rate among the other guests present in the restaurant was 63%! The attack rate for people sitting at the ill person's table: 91% (Marks et al. Epidemiology and Infection 2000;124:481-87).

Yep, Revere, you made the right choice by staying off the plane. Hope all is better soon.

The six hour plane ride alone would have made you twice as ill.
Hot 20 minute bath, chicken noodle soup, tons of water.

A hot rum toddy will set you right.

Lemon Juice
Honey
2 Disprin
Hot water
As much Rum as you like.

The last time I had something like that I subsisted on gatorade and coffee (the good gatorade from powder with glucose not HFCS). Everything else I ate seemed to be converted into gas and toxins.

daedalus2u

OMG you are right. The Rum would taste awful. You don't put rum in a hot toddy - it's good 12 year old scotch.

Try it - it is yummy!

meetings are silly. Send emails instead, make a forum or/and webpage for communication. No need to travel.

Revere(s)

Hope you are feeling better. Get well soon.

Sorry R. Had RSV a year ago-gift also from my grandson #2-thought I'd cough my eyeballs out. I recommend wonton soup and white rice from your fav Chinese Place (Chinese penicillen)

Still, gotta love the buggers (grandkids)........

Yo Revere, dude I feel for you, that is one nasty bug, and puke jokes are hardly as funny when one is doing the puking oneself.

Serious questions:

Risks & benefits of "stopping up" the diarrhea by taking a) a bulking agent or OTC antidiarrheal such as Kaopectate, or b) a narcotic analgesic such as codiene that is known to cause constipation as a side effect.

My sense of this is that the bulking agents (kaolin) would be relatively safe, but slowing down intestinal transport (narcotic analgesics) would be potentially dangerous since it would cause retention of virus and toxins for a longer period.

Same question, anti-emetics: Any risks of viral/toxic retention for taking antiemetics? (Here in California, the most widely available antiemetic is cannabis, and most people know someone who uses it recreationally if not medically: thus the potential for people using it to self-medicate to stop puking. Any risks?)

g336: People have different ideas about this (in theory) but in practice I gave Mrs. R. Zofran for nausea and I took Immodium for diarrhea. I suppose it depends on which organism you think is in control. If you think that vomiting and diarrhea are your body's way of getting rid of a poison you might not want to stop it. If you think it is the virus's way of making its way to another host you would. By default I choose to treat these things symptomatically.

g336: Without going into detail cannabis is the best choice, for hundreds of ailments.
Old school is always good for diarrhea.
Banana, Rice, Apple, Toast (BRAT). Stops it every time.

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How are you feeling revere? Are you on the mend?