A HELL ON THE EARTH

   Today, I’ll talk about the disease that I have had in my life. When I was a child, I was very delicate, and I had many diseases such as asthma, measles, chicken pox, and so on. I have suffered from many types of influenza and numberless cold. But these were not diseases that I felt most painful (as far as I remember.).
   The most painful disease was “nonbacterial acute gastroenteritis”, a stomach problem caused by a norovirus.
   “Nonbacterial” means “not caused by bacilli”, and “gastroenteritis” is “an illness of the stomach that makes stomach and intestine become swollen and causes diarrhea and vomiting”. And norovirus is a virus that causes the disease with strong infectiousness.
   If you are infected by the virus, you will suddenly vomit, have diarrhea, suffer from a stomachache, have chills, run a fever of 38 degrees, and feel something heavy on your stomach several hours before you vomit. These symptoms subside in a few days, but in case of babies or the elderly, it lasts longer.
   Noroviruses infect you through your oral cavity, and the route of infection is classified as follows.

1. Infected by food or water

• Eating something that store many viruses or be polluted by them. (For example, oysters, blue mussels, and many bivalves tend to store the viruses.)
• Drinking water polluted by noroviruses.

2. Transmitted from person to person

• Getting viruses from patients’ feces or vomit via toilets or hands.
• Getting viruses from patients’ feces or vomit, which are dispersed in the air. Airborne infection.
• Eating food cooked by patients. 

   Noroviruses can live for several weeks on the surface of clothes, beddings, or furniture. And they don’t die by alcoholic antiseptic. Once they enter your body, there are no way which treats you directly. There is no effective antiviral drug to noroviruses. So what only you can do is drinking some water, and standing by a toilet.
   To prevent infection, what you need are “heating” and “washing”. Enough heating kills viruses in food. So if you eat oysters or blue mussels, you should heat them thoroughly. And washing hands enough will carry away the viruses that don’t die by alcoholic antiseptic or soap.

   When I was infected by the noroviruses, I was a high school student, who was busy with studying for the entrance exam. Even now, I don’t know why, from what, I was infected. I didn’t eat oysters, and there were no absentees because of infectious disease in my school.
   I suffered. I vomited, had diarrhea. I couldn’t leave from a bathroom. I couldn’t drink anything. After hellish several days, my condition had improved a little. But my weight fell by 3 kg.


You should prevent them, if you want to live a happy life.