Let me preface this with a little background info. I am an advisor for our school's FIRST robotics team, a national robotics competition for high school students all over the country. This year, we entered two regional events, the first of which occurred last weekend, Mar 4-6, at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA. We left Wednesday evening for the Thursday-Saturday event.
Everything was going well. The competition was proceeding better than expected for our team, in 9th of 63 by Friday evening. Had a few good meals courtesy of sponsors and what not, had a good time meeting people from other teams. Then...
Friday night, around 11 pm, we're back in our hotel. The mentor students from GA Tech (god bless her) were along with us. Everyone is hanging out, having a good time. Then I get the first report. One of the Tech kids puked. No big deal, no telling what wacky college kids were up to. Maybe some alcohol. Seemed unlikely. Maybe some bad food? Who knows? Not one of our high schoolers, he can take care of himself. Then, 15 minutes later, it's one of our girls spewing. Did they eat at the same place? Well, we all ate at the sponsor event. Uh oh. 10 minutes later, one of our boys has decided to revisit his earlier meal. Crap, what's going on? Over the course of the evening, probably 10 of the 44 people on our bus were afflicted with some type of stomach bug. Not good.
At the competition site the next day, turns out we're not the only team in this situation. A lot of teams are down 3-15 kids due to this illness, whatever it is. Probably a little less than half the attending people.
Turns out we had an outbreak of some strain of a norovirus, aka the stomach flu. Not surprising considering how many objects exchange hands. Every team has giveaways with their team names and numbers on them, buttons, pens, cool blinky things, etc. And our team was gracious enough to provide a nice contamination zone via an Internet cafe style setup in the lobby.
It was cool, got to clean up some puke on the bus, watch a few others vomit in trashcans. On the return trip home, we quarantined the sick to the back of the bus. They turned green at the mere mention of food or blowing chunks. So, I was gracious enough to provide the others with a top ten list of forbidden words for the ride home.
10. vomit
9. puke
8. upchuck
7. hurl
6. spew
5. blow chunks
4. ralph
3. barf
2. reverse peristalsis
1. uneat
I told them if we go back to VCU next year, one of our giveaways should be those SARS masks with our team logo on it.
