HEALTH officials have claimed Scots taking extra precautions against the winter vomiting bug have helped to limit its impact on health services.
Health Protection Scotland (HPS) claims increased awareness about spread-ing the norovirus has meant hospitals are experiencing normal activity for the season, despite a large increase in the number of cases in the community.
Figures from HPS last week showed there were a total of 18 wards closed throughout the country – the same number as the same period the previous year and one more than in 2011.
Cases of the virus in 2012 have risen by 679 (32%) on the five-year average taken between 2007 and 2011.
Evonne Curran, a nurse consultant in infection control for HPS, claimed people taking heed of warnings to avoid hospitals, residential homes and schools if they feel unwell had helped to limit the impact on the NHS.
Ms Curran said: "This is the peak season for norovirus – a couple of weeks either side of Christmas –and there's definitely a lot of it about in the community at the moment.
"But we are not seeing any crisis or meltdown in the NHS. That's definitely not the picture we have of how frontline services are coping.
"At the moment we have norovirus activities in hospitals at the seasonal normal of what we were expecting, considering it's a very bad year.
"There has been an enormous amount of effort put into to getting the message across to people about how important it is to avoid certain places of you feel ill and people seem to have got the message."
The highest number of ward closures was seen in week three of 2010, when 53 wards were forced to close.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article