Dear Rouleurs,

MMT is not a happy camper. After a year of really good health, presumably due to COVID lockdown and working from home, he’s been sick with Norovirus.  ‘What the heck is a norovirus?’ MMT hears his loyal readership ask.  Well, it’s a very small and very contagious virus that causes gastroenteritis aka in MMT’s case stomach cramps and ghastly diarrhoea.  In MMT’s case its about 99.9% certain that he caught from close proximity to his weaponised pathogen carriers (WPCs), aka his kids, via their Childcare. This is what the little rascal looks like under an electron microscope. 

In case you, dear readers were wondering, the Norovirus is named after the city of Norwalk, Ohio, USA where an outbreak occurred in 1968. Apparently, this is when Western medicine figured out what was going on. So in the dubious honour of being completely nobbled by this stomach virus, aka the Winter Vommiting Virus …ghastly…. MMT now has a new FLA for his blog tags. YAFV, which stays for Yet Another F*&king Virus. After the last 12 months, MMT surmises that entire population is fed up with YAFV. After this illness, MMT is beginning to think that may be Howard Hughes was on to something.

The trouble with Norovirus is that there doesn’t appear to be much that modern medicine can do about it.  MMT visited his GP clinic a couple of times and was given a prescription for anti-nausea/cramping medicine. The second visit resulted in a ‘sample’ test which confirmed a very high viral count.  Both times the doctor advised aganist antibiotics, correctly. That kind of medicine simply doesn’t work against a tiny virus. Now in most normal human beings this lasts a few days, at worst 2 weeks.  MMT had it for 17 days.  This pretty much ruined Easter and any plans about around cycling or even being well enough watch it via GCN+ or SBS.

Norovirus is a serious business.  In fact, putting aside COVID’s awful fatality fate, Norovirus is  very bad news and its largely gone under the radar.  According to the USA’s Centre for Disease Control, there are upwards of 680 million cases a year, resulting about 200,000 deaths. Sadly 25% of the fatalities are children under 5 in developing countries. Most of these deaths arise from dehydration.

There doesn’t appear to be any vaccine for this on the horizon, unlike Coronvirus.  To make matters worse the virus seems to mutate like crazy and a victim only needs to ingest approximately 20 virus particles to become infected.  About the only effective mechanisms available to prevent the spread of the virus are social distancing and vigorous hand washing.

So there you have it, Coronavirus be damned, watch out for the dreaded Norovirus

Later

MMT