If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, call 988 or message the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.
Noro is everywhere right now, and we’re seeing clients across the country dealing with three or four cases at once of GI-related illness among their employees. If you have a few employees out with profuse vomiting and diarrhea, you should assume it’s noro. Start by addressing it with your employees - make sure sick employees are staying home, and ask other employees to step up their handwashing. Consider moving from sick calls to daily wellness check surveys for three or four days so you can ensure that employees who are coming to work are actually symptom-free. Keep anyone who lives with or dates a sick employee out of work for at least three days, even if they don’t have symptoms themselves. Sanitize your bathrooms thoroughly, and consider doing a full noro-sanitizing protocol, even though it’s a big time investment - and definitely do it if anyone got sick at work.
Unfortunately, it’s very possible to get long COVID after only having mild symptoms during your initial infection. Though there is a higher risk of long COVID for people who were hospitalized, in fact the majority of long COVID cases are in people who had relatively mild illness. It’s best to assume your employee is being truthful about their symptoms and connect them with your HR team for the appropriate accommodations or leave.
We’ve long known that E. coli causes the vast majority of UTIs, but a new study looked at how it got into our systems in the first place. It found that about 8% of UTIs, or about a half million cases per year, can be linked to E. coli found in meat. They looked at samples of grocery store meat and then looked at blood and urine samples from people hospitalized with UTIs at the same time in the same area. About 8% of them seemed to be caused by the same strains that were found in that meat. The E. coli in the meat wasn’t necessarily enough to make someone sick just by passing through their gut - instead, it made them sick when it traveled (or got wiped) from the anus to the urinary tract. So, from an outbreak or food safety perspective, this isn’t something employers need to worry about right now. There’s no need to exclude employees with diagnosed UTIs, even if the cause is E. coli bacteria. Employers should only worry about E. coli that’s enterohemorrhagic (including O157) or shiga-toxin producing, especially in foodservice employees.