Did you survive the first great epidemic of 2008? It was in the papers all right, but did it really happen? Was it a disease, and was it really an epidemic? Who can tell?

awI blame Camilla. After she failed to smash the champagne bottle when she was naming that big new Cunard cruise ship, old sea dogs everywhere knew immediately that the vessel was cursed (or so I read in the Mail). Sure enough, in less time than it takes to say "Long John Silver", dozens of passengers were laid low by diarrhoea, abdominal pains, vomiting, fever, headaches and a complete inability to play deck quoits.

And the next thing you know, half the country has it. "Sickness bug victims swamp NHS Direct with a million queries" (Mail); "Bug shuts wards at one hospital in five" (Telegraph); "Work hit by vomit bug toll" (Sun) and, on a slightly brighter note, "Doctors urge stomach bug sufferers to stay at home" (Guardian).

It was playing hell with the economy, too. An outfit called Active Health Partners was quoted as saying British business lost £80m in two days because of bug-related absences, though I have no idea how it arrived at that sum and anyway it doesn't seem that much. And the Telegraph regaled us with some perplexing maths of its own: "Economists say the country could lose £12m a week from workers contracting the virus. Since October, the total loss is estimated at £234m."

More figures. The Mail said this bug was 100,000 times more infectious than salmonella, and it had struck down, ooh, lots and lots of people. Some papers said 100,000 per week while others said 200,000, though the BBC insisted this was "just the tip of the iceberg", as so many stoical cases went unreported.

The Sun published a ten-point bug-beating plan, of which point five was: "Avoid keeping a bucket used for vomit beside your bed. It's a pool of virus." The Mail also waded in deep, quoting a professor of microbiology worried about hazards in the workplace. "People being sick in the corner of the office will just add to the opportunity for the virus to get around," he said. Indeed.

Then a Telegraph "case study" provided us with first-hand insight into the ravages of the disease, looking at the case of a 59-year-old woman from Sheffield. She caught the bug on a Friday, she said, felt "wiped out" and unable to move on Saturday, and didn't start to perk up until Sunday afternoon.

Hmmm. Unpleasant no doubt, but not terribly different, I understand, from the average weekend as experienced by many modern university students.

It turns out, of course, that this bug isn't quite the Black Death. In fact it is probably our second-commonest ailment after the common cold. There is no real treatment apart from bed rest, no prevention apart from washing your hands, and it only poses any danger to those who are already very vulnerable.

And has there even been an epidemic? No doubt in a year or so an academic study will slip out quietly, offering some concrete measure of what has happened, but in the meantime there are grounds for scepticism.

When NHS Direct published its figures for inquiries from the public at Christmas and New Year, for example - a significant sample of 1.2 million over 11 days - the bug was not at the top of the chart. Among telephone callers, queries about vomiting came second to dental pain (though the papers had never once mentioned an epidemic of toothache), while among online enquirers the chief concern was flu, followed by chickenpox and chest infection. Vomiting and diarrhoea weren't in the top five.

It would be wrong, however, to think that the whole affair has left us with nothing at all. Until very recently most of those unlucky enough to catch the bug haven't even known what they had, but that is now changing, because the bug has had a relaunch.

For years it went by the distinctly forgettable name of winter vomiting disease or, in America, Norwalk-like virus, after a 1968 outbreak in Norwalk, Ohio. But in 2002 it was rebranded to make it easier to remember. (Did you know they did that? Demanding work, I'm sure.) In consequence, as you almost certainly learned over the past few weeks, today the vomit bug is officially the norovirus. Me, I still think "Camilla virus" is catchier.

Unfortunate timing

Pity the poor reporters who have to cover the US election for our daily newspapers. They have to write about a political process that moves at the speed of a glacier, and which fittingly starts in some of the coldest places there are.

Long before the first vote is cast (although of course they aren't votes, but more a form of electoral foreplay), every possible permutation of outcomes has been discussed to death. And then, when something finally happens, it happens at precisely that moment of the day, or rather that moment in the middle of the night, which allows everyone on the planet, from the best TV pundit to the most moronic blogger, to say their tuppenceworth before you get a word into print.

Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University

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