While our visit to the Blue Mountains two weeks ago was eerie enough on its own, it appears to be more dimensions to the creepiness. Although not mentioned in the blog post, my girlfriend mentioned in the comment section that we got food poisoning. And we certainly did, we actually ended up having to go the hospital in middle of the night after we got home. Well, apparently we were not the only ones:

Ten die as gastro hits nursing home 
(Sydney Morning Herald).

It turns out a gastroenteritis outbreak hit the same weekend, leaving a significantly higher than normal number of elderly passing away in a Blue Mountains nursing home. And giving the title of my original write-up (The Blue Mountains: How to survive the mountain towns) a morbid twist..

Now the opposition is blaming the nursing home and accuse the government of covering up the incident, because they sent out the press release late on a friday (seriously, such is Australian politics). What’s interesting is that if we caught it outside the nursing home (we never visited any nursing homes, except for the general home for the elderly that is the mountain towns themselves), that probably means the source was not there - and could help shed light on both the original source and possibly help clear the nursing home. This is also a really good demonstration of the value of a tool like the disease map project mentioned last week.

However, after seeing it in the media we informed the NSW Food Authority that we also got it, so if it’s useful for them to know, it gets to the right people.