Vomiting robot reveal virus secrets

CHUCK. Chunder. Heave. It’s a tough job — so scientists built a machine to do it for us. The result? New insight on how gastro viruses get to be so contagious.

CHUCK. Chunder. Heave. It’s a tough job — so scientists built a machine to do it for us. The result? New insight on how gastro viruses get to be so contagious.

Researchers at North Carolina State Universeity and Wake Forest University had a problem.

How to check if gastro viruses, such as the norovirus, manage to get airborne.

Specifically, do they enter the atmosphere when we vomit?

Human subjects were out of the question.

Not only are there ethical concerns, there’s the difficulty in finely tuning technicolour yawns to examine variations in conditions.

So they built a vomiting robot.

And it’s not the first: A British droid has been doing a similar job since 2013.

Vomiting devices allowed the scientists to precisely control the volume of vomit, the density of the heave, the viscosity of the pavement pizza and the pressure of the projectile yawn.

Essentially, the machine took the hit for the human team.

“When one person vomits, the aerosolized virus particles can get into another person’s mouth and, if swallowed, can lead to infection,” professor Lee-Ann Jaykus says. “But those airborne particles could also land on nearby surfaces like tables and door handles, causing environmental contamination. And norovirus can hang around for weeks, so anyone that touches that table and then puts their hand to their mouth could be at risk for infection.”

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a vomiting machine that gives them a controlled way to observe and study vomiting over and over again. Source: Matt Shipman / PLOS

The tests allowed the researchers to determine how, and how much, of the virus was “aerosolised” — or was able to float about in the atmosphere.

“In terms of overall percentage, not a lot of the virus is aerosolized,” says professor Francis de los Reyes II. “But in absolute terms, it is a lot compared to the amount of virus needed to cause infection.”

Only 0.02 per cent of the total amount of virus contained in the vomit was able to get airborne.

“But that can still amount to thousands of virus particles — more than enough to infect other people,” Jaykus says.

So, yes: The gastro virus can get airborne like cold and flu viruses.