A stomach virus may be going around Mike Moseley Elementary School, where about 20 of the school's nearly 650 students were absent on Thursday.
Pat Shull, the school district's director of health services, said she believes it could be a 24-hour stomach bug. The number of absences due to the illness isn't alarming or unusual, she said.
Austin Wilson, a kindergartner, was one of the students sickened.
"I was eating something and then, when I came to school, I didn't know if I was sick or something. And then I threw up," he said.
His father, Kendall Wilson, said he wasn't the only parent to get a call from school about a sick child.
"Yeah, a ton of parents -- there are probably three or four kids sitting back in the back nurse's office," he said.
Dr. Joshua Egly at Medical Center of Arlington said stomach bugs are common. He said he sees up to 10 patients a day with such viruses, which he said are not too serious.
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"If children can't keep any fluid down, they may need to go to the emergency room to get checked out and maybe get on some medications to help them feel better," he said.
Symptoms include vomiting and diarrhea, but the severity varies from person to person, Egly said.
"Some kids may be sick for a day or some, some, may be sick a little bit longer, and some could probably continue to go to school even though they are a little sick," he said.
Egly recommended that people who are sick wash their hands carefully and refrain from sharing food or drinks with others.
"If other people in the family has seen the virus before, been infected, they may not get sick due to their immune system, but usually it affects younger children, and sometimes we'll get adults, but usually not as severe," he said.
