PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Your family and close friends might have given you more than gifts and season’s greetings last month. Through December and into the new year, cases of norovirus, a common stomach bug, have been surging to the highest levels in more than a decade nationwide.
“It’s one of the easiest and most contagious viruses to get,” said KYW Newsradio Medical Editor Dr. Brian McDonough.
He first heard rumblings about the current norovirus surge at the beginning of December, and it wasn’t long until the calls started coming in.
“They don’t know why, but they’ve just got diarrhea, they’ve got nausea, they feel horrible,” he said. “And then somebody else in the family gets it, and somebody else gets it, and it kind of begins this cycle.”
Per the CDC, norovirus, spread by tiny particles of vomit or feces, mostly in confined spaces, is the leading cause of food-borne illnesses in the U.S., and McDonough said it is one of the easiest and most contagious viruses to get.
“It gets on surfaces, it can go from person to person, if you share utensils, anything like that, it can spread really fast.”
McDonough has a simple prescription for steering clear of it.
“Probably your top 10 list, No. 1 through 10 is washing hands, washing hands, washing hands, …,” he said. “Can’t stress that enough.”
Should you get it, McDonough said, fortunately most cases pass in a couple days with proper rest and hydration. “But in those couple days, I mean, you feel really sick. You can’t keep food down. You vomit. You have diarrhea.”
In rare cases, emergency room visits are possible.
McDonough recommends drinking fluids to stay hydrated, and staying away from others to curb the spread. If the symptoms don’t go away after a couple days of rest, he says to call a doctor, because it might be something else.