Fact sheets

Gastroenteritis fact sheet (PDF 207KB)

Public Health action

• Therapeutic Guidelines: Antibiotic. Therapeutic Guidelines Limited: Melbourne

• Communicable Disease Guidelines, for teachers, child care workers, local government authorities and medical practitioners. Department of Health, Western Australia  (PDF 148.82 KB)

• OD 0103/08 Public Health Intervention for Sporadic Enteric Notifications

• OD 0303/10 Guidelines for exclusion of people with enteric infections and their contacts from work, school and child-care settings

Notifiable disease data and reports

• Up-to-date Vibrio parahaemolyticus notification data

General infectious disease reports

Additional sources of information

• Control of Communicable diseases Manual  

Exclusion

In general, people with symptoms of enteric infections should be excluded from work, school, activities involving groups of people (e.g. sports training, group camps) and other situations where disease transmission may occur, until they have been asymptomatic for 24 hours and have normal stools.

However, people who are at high risk of transmitting their infection or work in a high risk setting (i.e. workers in health care, residential care and child care, food handlers, young children in child care, and cases who are faecally incontinent, as shown in the table below) should be excluded until they are asymptomatic for 48 hours and have normal stools.

Enteric precautions for hospitalised and institutionalised patients.

Case definition

Laboratory criteria

1. Isolation of V. parahaemolyticus from the patient’s stool, blood or tissue
OR

2. Isolation of V. parahaemolyticus from epidemiologically incriminated food (usually seafood) in the presence of a clinically compatible illness.

Clinical picture

An intestinal disorder characterised by watery diarrhoea and cramps, sometimes with nausea and vomiting, fever and headache. Occasionally, a dysentery-like illness is observed with bloody or mucoid stools, high fever and high white cell count. Typically it is a disease of moderate severity lasting 1 to 7 days. Systemic infection and death are rare.