Wikipedia has an excellent article on Norovirus that will tell you more than you really want to know about Norwalk and its relatives. I think my adventure with it might have been the result of eating unwashed strawberries. They smelled so ambrosial I popped a couple off the top of the punnet in the car on the way home. I won’t do that again any time soon.

As for Aspartame, I’ll go with the experts’ advice — typically found in the last para of any news story — that you have to eat a hell of a lot of it to put yourself into a danger zone. I seem to remember them saying the same thing about cyclamate.

If it doesn’t agree with you, don’t use it. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. If someone you know has a dozen-a-day Diet Coke habit, that person has worse problems than the cancer threat from Aspartame.