Virus Passed Through Football Game

Oct. 26 -- College football players sick with food poisoning passed the virus to the opposing team on the field in the first documented case of its kind in sports, researchers say.

The Duke University teammates vomited in the locker room and onthe sidelines during the Sept. 19, 1998, game against Florida Stateafter getting sick on a turkey lunch. Duke lost 62-13, but notbefore the virus crossed the line of scrimmage.

“The only contact between the two teams was on the playingfield,” said Dr. Christine Moe, an assistant professor ofepidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.“The virus was passed by people touching each other’s contaminatedhands, uniforms and maybe even the football itself.”

Game films showed ill Duke players with vomit on their jerseyscolliding with opponents, and Duke players wiping their mouthpieceson their hands, then touching opponents’ faces and later shakingtheir hands.

Transmission Through Sports

In a study in today’s New England Journal of Medicine, theresearchers urged coaches to bench players with such illnesses andstress the importance of handwashing when ill and after using thebathroom.

The food and waterborne virus — which is from a family calledNorwalk-like viruses because the first outbreak was detected at aNorwalk, Ohio, school in the late 1960s — causes vomiting, stomachcramps and diarrhea.

The virus family causes an estimated 96 percent of cases ofnonbacterial gastroenteritis, or inflammation of the stomach andintestines. It gets far less attention than food-borne bacteriasuch as E. coli because it causes no permanent damage and rarelykills.

Person-to-person transmission sometimes occurs in crowded livingsituations, such as on cruise ships. But this is the firstdocumented case of transmission among participants in a sportsevent, according to Karen Becker, an epidemiologist at the Centersfor Disease Control and Prevention who led the study.