A nasty strain of viral gastroenteritis is sweeping across Canadian hospitals, nursing homes and other health facilities, in an outbreak that health officials are calling one of the worst outbreaks in years.
Those infected are hit with severe diarrhea, vomiting, nausea and stomach cramps that can last several days.
Health officials say the illness is unpleasant and contagious, but not fatal in most cases.
"It just makes you feel like you're going to die,'' says Dr. Tim Booth, director of the viral diseases division at the Public Health Agency of Canada's national microbiology lab in Winnipeg.
The virus is suspected to be a new, more vicious strain of the Norwalk virus, a bug that normally peaks between December and March.
Cases have been reported from Halifax to Saskatchewan and similar outbreaks have been reported in the United States, Europe and Japan.
At least 29 health care institutions in the Montreal area have been affected, while several hospitals in New Brunswick closed their doors last month to try to control the spread of the virus.
At the Verdun Hospital, 38 patients have fallen ill in the oubreak, forcing the hospital to quarantine the patients on two floors and restrict visits. The Jewish General Hospital in Montreal meanwhile is postponing elective surgeries to make more beds available for those suffering from the outbreak.
The virus is putting strain on the Quebec health system, which has also had to contend recently with Clostridium difficile, a bacterium that has killed as many as 2,000 hospital patients in the province since 2003.
Both the Norwalk virus and C. difficile cause diarrhea, leading some hospital staff to initially confuse one with the other. The Norwalk virus is rarely fatal, however. And the number of C. difficile infections has decreased by 60 per cent in Quebec since the peak of that epidemic in 2004.
The last time Quebec was hit with an epidemic of gastroenteritis was in 2002-2003, when there were 292 outbreaks in health-care institutions.
Viral gastroenteritis - often mislabelled the stomach flu - usually lasts two to four days in healthy people but can lead to severe dehydration in the elderly and infants.
The best way to prevent the transmission of both the Norwalk virus and C. difficile bacterium is through frequent hand washing.
"This is a disease that we can prevent with good hygiene measures,'' says Dr. Horatio Arruda, director of public health for the Quebec Department of Health.
