What do you do if someone pukes at your restaurant or event?

Posted on October 21, 2008 by Ben Chapman

Clean it up.  That's the easy answer.

Exactly how is another question.  After Amy's story of one of her students yacking in class, we started tossing around that question and using norovirus outbreaks at Georgetown and USC as hooks. Mayra and I decided to build a food safety infosheet around it.  After reviewing available guidelines from regulators and peer-reviewed research publications, we came up with some steps for cleaning up vomit. 

We based our recommedations on a norovirus-induced vomit (because aerosolized spread of virus particles is likely). 

If you are looking for a cool paper on vomit, check out: Evidence for airborne transmission of Norwalk-like virus (NLV) in a hotel restaurant (Epidemiology and Infection, 2000. 124:481-487), which discusses the spread of post-vomit norovirus (abstract is here).

A pdf of the vomit cleanup food safety infosheet can be found here.

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BarfBlog - February 1, 2009 11:03 AM
I've always loved the UK term for norovirus: winter vomiting virus. It's so perfect and descriptive. Norovirus is great, but it doesn't have the same ring to it. Seeing that it's winter in the Northern Hemisphere, parts of Canada and...
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