Canadian research confirms that the viruses responsible for gastroenteritis can be transmitted by air, and calls for revisiting procedures in hospitals.
We suspected, but here is the officially confirmed information. Noroviruses, responsible for 50% of gastroenteritis worldwide, are spread through the air. Canadian researchers made this observation in a study, published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
54% of hospital rooms contaminated
Their work was carried out in eight hospitals in Canada, at the time of the peak of the epidemic in the country – concomitant with that recorded in France. The researchers took air samples there one meter from the patients, in front of the entrance to their room and at the nurses’ station.
According to their analyzes, noroviruses were present in the air of six of the eight centers studied. They were detected in 54% of the rooms of patients with gastro, 38% of the corridors giving access to their room and 50% of the nursing stations. The virus concentrations ranged from 13 to 2,350 per cubic meter of air. Note that the presence of about twenty noroviruses is generally sufficient to cause gastroenteritis.
Review protocols in hospitals
According to the authors of the study, these results should prompt a review of the measures applied in hospitals in order to avoid nosocomial infections. “The current measures are only intended to limit direct contact with infected patients,” writes Caroline Duchaine, of the University of Laval (Quebec), who led the work. These rules should be reviewed taking into account the possibility of aerial spread of noroviruses ”.
The researcher thus recommends “the installation of mobile air filtration units”, or even “the wearing of respiratory protection near patients struck by gastro”. However, it specifies that the effectiveness of such measures must be tested before they are implemented.
Until now, noroviruses have been suspected of spreading mainly through the secretions of infected patients (saliva, vomit and feces). So, in November, British researchers designed a robot that vomits to assess how gastroenteritis microbes spread during projections. According to their results, when a person with norovirus vomits, they propel their germs up to an 8 square meter radius – 3 meters in front of them, 2.2 to the sides.
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