There’s been more than a few outbreaks of the Norwalk Virus this winter. Sometimes called the Cruise Ship Shits, the Norwalk Virus is a nasty little bug(ger) that was first detected in 1968 in an elementary school in Norwalk, Ohio. Known now as Norovirus, this little beastie is transmitted by the fecal-oral route.
Cruise ships, hospitals and schools are the places where Norovirus shows up most often, usually with headlines along the lines of "Cruise Ship Passengers Sick", "Hospital Floor Closed" and "Students Sick". Most Norovirus outbreaks are hard to link back to one causative act, but the general propagation routes, bad hygiene and bad housekeeping, look like the best suspect.
Along the same lines as E.Coli contaminated fruits and vegetables, Nororvirus has the same economic factors. Here’s why: Cleaning staff at a hospital, hotel or cruise ship are the low persons on the financial totem pole.
As invisible persons, those who clean the rooms, floors and walls, are hired from the pool of unskilled and underpaid. Look around the next time you’re at a hotel. You’re looking at new immigrants, or illegals, who are willing to work for the smallest wage possible. Why? Maintenance is a ‘cost’ to an organization or business, so the route to profitability is to cut costs: Get someone cheaper.
For instance, of all the hospital cuts that went on in Ontario’s Health Care system, how many administrators and senior manager positions were cut? If your answer is Zero, then you win a case of C. Difficile the next time you wind up in hospital.
Who was cut then? Cleaning staff, nursing staff, custodians and support staff. Without regular, thorough disinfection and continuous housekeeping, the guck accumulates. One reason is hospitals are full of sick people, of course. This is not to say that Operating Rooms or Treatment areas are not very clean, but the overall level of cleanliness has declined because the number of staff who actually do the cleaning, has been decreased.
Hotels are notorious for working their housekeeping staff like Roman orchard slaves, as the time it takes to clean a room for a new guest, directly impacts the number of housekeeping people they have to hire. If you can save 90 seconds, then, over 20 rooms, you’ve saved 30 minutes, which means your staff can do another one or two rooms and you don’t have to hire that extra person or two.
If the staff doesn’t like it, well, fire them all and hire a new bunch of ignorant peasants. Naturally, woe betide any support staff who mentions such words as "union" or "unsafe work conditions" or "I’d like a raise because they raised the minimum wage." Bloody troublemakers. I am being ironic here.
Which leads to a fascinating study as to what parts of a hotel room are the filthiest. One would think the toilet, shower and sink would be. Nope. Those get cleaned every day; they’re probably cleaner than your own bathroom at home, that you clean once or twice a week.
The big culprits are the TV remote and the telephone handset. Let’s put it this way, when was the last time you cleaned your TV remote or telephone handset at home? Never? Fair enough, I don’t clean it either, but in a hotel room, you have people of various levels of hygiene in and out every couple of nights.
Ask to have the remote and the phone cleaned in your hotel room and you get looked at like you’ve just sprouted a spare head out of your right shoulder. Don’t ask about what lives on the comforter on your hotel bed. Those things might be washed once a week. At least the sheets get changed daily. ABC News’ 20/20 once shined a blue bio light on a hotel comforter and found things you don’t want to know about.
Schools? Same deal. Put a bunch of kids in a room for seven hours a day for a week and children, being children, will have been exposed to all kinds of bacteria, viruses and illness-causing yuk. Parents, being parents, as soon as precious Melinda or William come down with a sniffle, rush them to the doctor for antibiotics. Which helps create a whole legion of antibiotic-resistant strains of Norovirus, Heliobacter, or C. Difficile. By the way, Rhinovirus, the cold virus, will run its’ course in five to eight days. With all kinds of anti-viral medication, it should take about a week, give or take a couple of days.
Cruise Ships, essentially 4,000 room hotels that float, have the same problem. Housekeeping costs money and the turnaround time between passenger loads is so short that there is no time to thoroughly clean the ship from top to bottom. Fast turnaround means more profit.
Commercial Aircraft are the same deal, as an aircraft on the ground, being cleaned, is not generating revenue. I’ve flown on too many commercial flights that smell like a Legion urinal in the past few years. Aircraft groomers (that’s what you call a cleaner on the ground crew) get a tiny window of time to make the cabin vaguely orderly. Actual cleaning? As likely as getting a hot meal on a five-hour domestic flight.
I’m not a germophobe or suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but I do meet a lot of people in my job. A dozen years ago I started frequently washing my hands with soap and water after meeting a group of folks and being a little more circumspect about environmental cleanliness. It has cut down on the number of colds and flu I get. It is is purely a feeling, not a concrete numerical improvement. Where I can, I swab down the phone and TV remote with either an alcohol prep wipe or some Purell on a tissue. I also remove the bedspread in any hotel room I stay in. Has it helped? Well, it doesn’t hurt.
I’ve had a C. Difficile infection and suffered with post-operative Pneumonia. I don’t want to ever have them again. Both leave you feeling like you’ve been pulled face-first through a one-inch knot-hole by a tow truck. It takes about two months to feel normal again.
What is answer then? The answer is economic. All it will take is one broad epidemic outbreak for the smart folks to put two and two together. Realize that a lack of cleanliness in a public environment is directly proportional to the number of cleaning staff. More cleaning staff doing the day to day housekeeping means the environment is less likely to support an epidemic of a common virus.
This costs money, either in hiring back the folks you let go, or in lost time from work, closed hospitals, bad publicity for the hotel or cruise line and folks like you and me stuck in bed for a week. Choose which way you want to pay.
RoadDave 