Norovirus infections rise to highest level in years
‘Stomach flu’ cases driven by gatherings, lack of hand hygiene, says UCI Health infectious diseases expert
January 10, 2025
IN THE NEWS: Norovirus outbreaks have risen to their highest level in 12 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
What’s driving it, UCI Health infectious diseases expert Dr. Shruti Gohil tells Yahoo Lfe, could be the post-COVID-19 urge to gather and catch up coupled with a drop-off in hand-hygiene practices.
"We've got more outbreaks. People are unmasked. People are engaging with each other. They're not cleaning their hands, clearly. Cleaning and disinfection and all that stuff is down. And we need to shore those practices back up."
Gohil urges community members to get back into good hygiene practices to help prevent the spread of norovirus and other bugs this winter.
"You could literally, just by being careful yourself, save other people's lives indirectly. That's really, really important for people to understand, that you live in a community and that you have a responsibility to care, and to keep yourself clean, and keep others safe."
Gohil is a board-certified infectious disease expert, the associate medical director for UCI Health Epidemiology and Infection Prevention and an assistant professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the UC Irvine School of Medicine. Her clinical interests include hospital epidemiology, infection prevention, communicable disease transmission and multidrug resistant organism infections.
She led the UCI Health response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, including the clinical and epidemiologic assessment of healthcare providers and patients, COVID-19 testing and vaccination, exposure definition and response, contact tracing, vaccination and infection prevention strategies to limit viral spread.
She currently leads several national studies to assess patient risk for multidrug-resistant bacterial infections and to prompt physicians to limit the use of extended-spectrum antibacterial drugs in real time. These include the INSPIRE Demonstration Project, which was recently accepted by the National Institutes of Health Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory, a portfolio of large-scale clinical trials embedded in U.S. healthcare systems. Two randomized INSPIRE clinical trials now underway aim to improve antibiotic prescribing for patients who are hospitalized with abdominal or skin and soft-tissue infections.
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