sick at Marriott Castle Harbour Hotel needs to be investigated. The general consensus of those who became ill seems to be that it came from the hotel's water supply. Yet there are suggestions from the Health Department that this is a "Norwalk virus'' brought to Bermuda by visitors and spread through air contact because of poor human hygiene or sneezing.

The Health Department went so far as to alarm the public by suggesting that this virus would spread throughout Bermuda and cause something of a flu epidemic. Yet no-one seems to have been infected who did not visit the hotel and of the visitors no-one seems to have become ill if they did not consume either tap water or ice.

As one doctor has asked, "If it was a virus, why hasn't everyone else come down with it?'' Another has told this newspaper that he and his wife were both infected and "what we had was definitely a serious toxic poisoning, passed on through food or water''.

Health officials first cleared the hotel's water and food supply last Friday and then over 100 people who attended a Saturday night charity ball at the hotel became ill. The Health Department then announced the "Norwalk virus''.

Yet there were no new cases once the water supply was disconnected.

Now the water supply is being examined again, presumably because the problem did not spread thus bringing into question the virus theory. If a virus was the culprit then we must think that the families and co-workers of those attending the ball would have become sick. That does not appear to have happened. In any case a virus would have to have been very fast acting because those attending the ball on Saturday night were sick by Sunday morning which certainly sounds like a food or water problem.

The public has been alarmed because they thought Marriott Castle Harbour was engaging in a cover-up. That does not seem to be the case. Marriott spokesmen have been quite open in admitting a problem while relying on the Health Department for solutions. Added to that, Marriott has brought in an outside health safety consultant to examine the tank and to study other sanitation procedures. It seems clear to us that Marriott moved quickly to protect its guests, foreign or local.

The problem arises because the Health Department either moved too quickly or came to questionable decisions. The public was alarmed at the suggestion of an impending flu epidemic which was not good for locals or visitors and then concerned that a water problem might have been cleared and then gone on to infect over 100 attending a ball.

None of that is very satisfactory and causes concern about just how Bermuda deals with this kind of emergency. In this case we do not seem to have dealt with it very well. The truth seems to be that we do not know exactly where this illness came from or how it was spread. We have great sympathy for health officials who quite naturally did not want to overly alarm visitors or to brand Marriott Castle Harbour as an unhealthy place to visit. Yet Bermuda does have a duty to protect both visitors and the Island's public from unnecessary exposure to illness.