Reusable Bags Blamed for Norovirus Outbreak

What could possibly make Occupy Los Angeles camps even smellier? If more liberals started using reusable grocery bags when the city bans plastic grocery bags.

Reusable grocery bags can infect people with the norovirus, which yearly hospitalizes 800,000 people and kills another 800, a infectious virus that causes severe vomiting and diarrhea.

And as more cities like Los Angeles try to ban plastic grocery bags, reusable grocery bags will be more omnipresent in these cities, causing greater public health dangers.

A study will be published this week in The Journal of Infectious Diseases that solves the mystery of how a “a nasty outbreak of norovirus infections in a group of soccer players” left a soccer team ill.

The culprit was a reusable grocery bag, exactly like the ones people will have to use if more cities decide to ban plastic grocery bags.

The study found that the reusable grocery bag that infected the soccer players were contaminated with “the perfect pathogens.” More disturbing, though, was the reusable grocery bags could transfer the norovirus without person-to-person contact.

Doctors tried to determine how nine people became ill with the norovirus, which has infamously caused havoc on cruise ships, in less than 48 hours and, according to the report, “interviews revealed that most of those who became ill ate packaged cookies at a Sunday lunch” that were in a “a reusable grocery bag of snacks left in the empty hotel room occupied by the first girl who got sick.”

According to the report, “the puzzle fell into place. The girl had been very ill in the hotel bathroom, spreading an aerosol of norovirus that landed everywhere, including on the reusable grocery bag hanging in the room. When scientists checked the bag, it tested positive for the bug, even two weeks later.”

And yet, environmentalists seem to be fine with these public health risks, all in the name of their foolishly misguided “green crusades,” like banning plastic grocery bags, that inevitably have unintended consequences that end up doing more harm than good.