More than 500 children and staff have been struck down by a flu bug in Burnham-On-Sea and Highbridge.
Hundreds of pupils and teachers have phoned in sick over the last few days after a major outbreak of influenza and respiratory illness.
More than 20 primary and secondary schools across Somerset have been struck by the bug, which has symptoms including vomiting, headaches and flu-like sickness.
First news about the bug was reported on Burnham-On-Sea.com’s forums at the end of January.
And the problem has got worse since then – King Alfred School says it had around 350 youngsters away sick every day last week, resulting in around a quarter of the school’s pupils being absent.
Talking to Burnham-On-Sea.com on Wednesday (February 8th), headmaster Dr Keith Diffey said: “We still have about 20 per cent of pupils off, which is above the norm. Fortunately it’s not been massively disprutive.”
“With the half-term break coming next week, we hope that everyone will be able to recover and will be brought fully under control.”
Other local schools affected include East Huntspill Primary, where almost half of the children were unwell on several days and St Jospeh’s Primary School, where 10% of students were absent.
Also affected were Berrow Primary School, where 40 children were absent; Brent Knoll Primary School, where some classes had a third of pupils missing; St John’s Primary School, where 50 children were absent on Friday 33 on Monday; St Andrew’s Primary School, where twice as many children as normal were away.
