Oh for pete's sake! Call it what it is : food poisoning largely due to factory farming. Buy local, support family farms and farmers' markets.

it's a nasty bug likely caused by antibiotic overuse. know someone who's lost 20#s over several months and it hasn't responded for long to any of the antibiotics they've used. saps energy as well.

not food poisoning. not if YOU've got it.

What's interesting is that they haven't even mentioned rotovirus, which commonly hits young children. My son at age 4 had a severe stomach virus, and I would guess rotovirus was the culprit. He was the sickest I had ever seen anyone with it, and I had seen it many times before when I worked at a pediatric hospital. It dropped his blood sugar to 39 and put him in metabolic acidosis. Scary, scary stuff.

The Congress has cutting the budget and they didn't think that the FDA is important to public safety. Well here is the example of cutting the budget of FDA will hurt the safety of the food supply. And the seafood is coming next.

jkatze - Not food poisoning dude. I had C-Diff. I got it after I had surgery on my sinuses and had to take the required post-surgery antibiotics. The antibiotics kill off most of the bacteria in your gut, the bad bacteria and the good bacteria. The C-Diff is mostly unaffected by standard antibiotics. With all the other bacteria gone within your gut, the C-Diff now has free reign and takes over. The absolute worst month of my life. Luckily I'm in my early 30s, but if you're older or a kid, that bug can kill you. I refuse to take antibiotics now.

"Stomach flu"???!!?! No such thing as a stomach flu.....Flu is a respiratory ailment, per the CDC. Get it right 'news staff'!

I work in health care with the elderly, every single year without fail norovirus strikes retirement communities, assisted living facilities and skilled nursing facilities causing expensive hospitalizations and injuries. When an 80+ year old resident gets norovirus often they require a multi-day hospital admission then a multi-week inpatient rehab stay or multi-week home health admission to regain strength. Many of these residents sustain secondary injury due to falls (broken hips, broken pelvis, broken shoulders) related to the weakness norovirus causes.

Norovirus costs Medicare and Medicaid millions each year.
When are we going to start vaccinating against Norovirus?

Common Sense Mom - The over-use of antibiotics, over-vaccination (which weakens the immune system) and adherence to the medical model (thereby disregarding all that is involved in HEALTH) is what leads to these diseases. The answer is not a vaccine - the answer is HEALTH. Real food (traditionally prepared the way our ancestors ate), real vitamin D (the kind that comes from the sun, not the pasteurized milk jug), and exercise. One cannot expect a sedentary, homebound person who eats canned vegetables and processed meat to survive very long. That is why the elderly folks in the facilities you mentioned are so hard-hit. No vaccine can fix that.

In nursing homes norovirus can devastate the population. I once worked in a place that noroviris caused patients to fill their beds with diarrhea very fast and it was a week before about everyone had had it. We were quarantined. This was very different from food poisoning. I had never lived through this before and had worked in nursing homes at least 10 years.

In fact, I think the staff was hardly affected. !0 years earlier, we never had anything like that, but I do notice in a public restroom when women just walk out the door without washing their hands- it doesn't seem to be common knowledge anymore to do so. Even hospitals have been audited and found 30% noncompliance with hand washing. Doesn't THAT make your day?

My son and husband just got over norovirus. Bad Bad Bad stuff.

So giant industrialized farm operations are to blame for stomach viruses? Never-mind that 100 years ago, E. coli, Salmonella typhi (typhoid), and vibrio cholerae (cholera) have been causing deaths for hundreds of years? Antibiotic use in factory farms is certainly contributing to antibiotic resistance, but people have been dying from stomach bacterial and viral infections for thousands of years. Just because there are plenty of bacteria that we need in our gut does not mean there are plenty of NATURALLY occurring bacteria that make even the healthiest of people sick. No amount of beneficial bacteria in your gut can combat many of these illnesses. Many bacteria naturally produce endospores which are not easily destroyed.. not even by boiling. And for the people who so often like to blame industrialized farms for everything bad in the food world, outbreaks have been caused by plenty of local farmed fruits, vegetables, meat & dairy. Local may be more nutritious, but local (or natural for that matter) does not necessarily mean "safer". I have seen it first hand.

If you are in a nursing home, you are going to die before you leave! Just kidding, I know I'll be in a nursing home some day if I live long enough. Seriously though, the title of the article uses a common statistical trick. The total number of people dying from this condition is still very low so saying that it "doubled" is misleading. It is like reading that something is "statistically significant". To the common person this sounds huge but it can actually mean as low as 1%! Horse crud.