A one-year intensified study of outbreaks of gastroenteritis in The Netherlands.

This paper describes a study of 281 gastroenteritis outbreaks mainly from nursing homes and homes for the elderly (57%) (restaurants (11%), hospitals (9%) and day care centres (7%)).Direct person-to-person spread was the pre-transmission route in all settings (78%) except for the rest of the outbreaks where food was suspected in almost 90% of cases. The most common pathogen was norovirus (54%) followed by Salmonella spp (4%), rotavirus group A (2%) and Campylobacter spp (1%). Epidemiology and Infection 2005;133:9-21.