What on earth is going on? Primary schools local to me have had to close due to the d&v bug making the rounds. In one school, almost three quarters of students were absent. People seem to be catching it just by looking at each other, and it seems to be a particularly severe one, with people getting dehydrated as they are vomiting constantly and are unable to keep anything down.
I don't remember anything like this when I was a child. Yes you would get a bug doing the rounds, but you'd have a few years of catching everything when you started school, then it would ease off by age 8 or so.... I didn't catch a vomiting bug from I was 8 until I was about 15! Not to say I wasn't off sick for other reasons, but these vomiting bugs weren't the inevitable yearly event they are now.
My mum was a nurse for years, she reckons it's using antibac/disinfectant over soap and water - she says when she started her nursing training, they would obviously disinfectant certain things, but everything else would be given a good regular scrub down with soap and roasting hot water, and they had a massive barrel of rock salt which they'd scoop out and put in patient's baths, and she said wound infections weren't anything like now, and MRSA was unheard of.
I've actually changed this summer from antibac sprays to the more old fashioned cleaners like Stardrops and Vim, and bar soap instead of the dettol stuff, and touch wood we haven't had anything yet