But that small percentage still amounts to thousands of viral particles – ones that could end up on hands, toilets and door knobs, just to name the most likely of surfaces.
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So, they built a vomit machine. “The further you get from the aerosol, probably the better off you are”. Studies of the infection patterns that occur in outbreaks suggest that norovirus can indeed be aerosolized.
The first direct evidence that vomiting can aerosolize virus particles has come out of a study by researchers at North Carolina State University and Wake Forest University.
“(O)ur work here confirms that it’s not only possible but probable”, says Lee-Ann Jaykus, a professor of food, bioprocessing and nutrition sciences at NC State, co-author of a paper on the work, and director of the USDA-NIFA Food Virology Collaborative initiative. Not as much as you might think, it turns out. The scientists used the device to determine whether the virus was bioaerosolized during a simulated vomit and found that it absolutely was.
Then they ran a series of experiments, changing the variables to simulate a range of vomiting behavior.
If you’re near the splash zone of a public vomiting incident, what do you do?
Norovirus, too, had a stand-in.
Researchers wanted to know whether vomit could facilitate the spread of norovirus, a highly contagious stomach ailment notorious for turning unlucky cruise ships into ground zeroes for diarrhea epidemics.
So, the researchers enlisted a harmless stand-in, a bacteriophage that is often used in place of norovirus in experiments.
The study was published August. 19 in the journal PLOS ONE. Another device tests air from the chamber for airborne viruses.
“Taken together, they start to paint a pretty good picture of why norovirus is so atrociously infectious”, says Andrew Pavia, chief of the division of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Utah and a spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
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A mechanical system that imitates projectile vomiting. The team estimates that depending on pump pressure and the virus concentration in the throw-up, as few as 36 and as many as over 13,000 virus particles were released by the mechanical spewing.
