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Health Service Director Dr. Jack Turco said the New Hampshire Department of Public Health concluded there was some form of contamination at Collis Center that led to more than 100 students getting sick at the end of Fall term.
But Turco said Dartmouth Dining Services was not necessarily responsible for the rapid spread of the illness.
The Health Department inspected DDS facilities after the outbreak of the illness, which cased vomiting, nausea and diarrhea.
Turco said the Health Department gave questionnaires to students and found out many of the people who succumbed to the illness ate at Collis beforehand.
He said the Health Department came to the conclusion that the virus was spread at Collis.
But he stressed that though there may have been a common source of contamination, viral infections also pass from person to person through the air.
"I don't think it had anything whatsoever to do from improper technique over" at Collis, he said.
DDS Director Pete Napolitano said "if we are responsible, we would own [up to] that ... I would take every possible measure to curtail that from happening again."
He said "nothing conclusive" has been determined to link the spread of the virus to DDS.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and the state epidemiologist examined DDS procedures and gave them a "90-plus score overall," he said.
Napolitano said DDS currently employs "tight standards of operation."
Employees wear gloves, restrain their hair and are not allowed to smoke, he said.
According to Napolitano, leftovers are frozen, thrown away or used within 24 hours.
He said food is not allowed to remain in the "danger zone," or in temperatures of 40 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, which stimulate bacterial growth.
He said self-service food items, such as the bagel bins or the salad bars, would be the most likely sources of contamination.
Students should be educated to refrain from using their bare hands to choose food items, he said.
"I've been thinking of putting up signs ... don't just use your fingers and pick," he said.
Turco said though "there was a lot done at" the time of the outbreak to rule out obvious places of contamination, the College can only speculate what the source was.
"Maybe someone coughed at the salad bar," he said.
Harvard University suffered a similar outbreak in December and identified the cause as the Norwalk Virus after receiving results of DNA tests performed by the CDC.
"We didn't have enough specimens to definitively say it's the Norwalk virus," Turco said.
