MONTREAL - The Caribbean beckons winter-weary Canadians this time of year with its warm sea breezes, tall drinks and sun-baked beaches.
But put aside all jealous thoughts: according to Montreal Infectious Disease specialist Dr. Brian Ward, a significant portion of pleasure-seeking travelers end up perched on a toilet seat.
And the longer the trip, the greater the likelihood of such an attack. Ward says about one in three travelers on the road for two weeks or more will catch a type of tourist bug and suffer the pains of diarrhea.
The norovirus is one of the worst of those afflictions and he believes it's just that which forced a Montreal wedding group to spend its holiday in Cuba suffering extreme pain and digestive discomfort.
Sabrina Sollecito went with about 30 family members to a wedding in Holguin and saw just about every one of the bunch suffer the same ailment.
"It was bad. You start with the discomfort in your stomach, you're feeling nauseous and you know something is wrong," she said. "And of course the vomiting was bad."
The malady tore through the wedding party, picking off wedding party members one by one, stuck in the not-so-great indoors.
"I would notice people dropping off. I would ask where they were. And ‘oh well they're in the room.' And then the next day: ‘where is so-and-so?' ‘They're in the room,'" noted Sollecito's husband Martin Lopes.
Dr. Ward says that though one might try to avoid the bug in such cases, resistance is often futile.
"About 30 percent of travelers who go somewhere for more than two weeks end up with travelers' diarrhea of some kind," said Ward.
"It doesn't mean that people have been careless necessarily. It's just so easy to transmit it from hand to hand from the utensils that are used to serve at buffets."
