OS X :: Flash Drive Will Not Work When Plugged Into PC

I have/had a 16 GB Kingston Data Traveler flash drive with all of my work files on it. I travel a lot for work and I was just in Italy for 2 weeks. Anyway, I went to an internet cafe to print a document before a meeting. 20 minutes before I went to this place the drive worked fine. I got to the place, and it seemed to me that the guy didn't know what he was doing. He had machines running on XP and they were extremely slow, and he just kept clicking away. He finally turned to me and said that his machine wouldn't read my drive. I blanched and tried putting it back into my Macbook and felt sick when I saw that the drive was no longer recognizable on my Mac either.

I had backed up almost everything on the server before I left for Italy, and I had emailed most of the new documents I had created while away from the office. Unluckily, there was one folder of documents that I hadn't backed up on the server because there wasn't enough space there (grrr), so I had left them on the drive. A few lessons I learned:
-back up on the desktop or hard drive as well while traveling
-bring the portable printer next time
-don't let someone mess with my jump drive

Should I reformat the drive and attempt to use it again, or should I buy a new one that is a better brand? I definitely don't want a repeat of this. This is the first time I've ever had a problem like this--all the other drives I've ever used, from expensive to cheapies, all worked fine. Is there any way to recover any of these files or should I just accept that they're gone? My guess that being an internet cafe with PCs, the computers were full of viruses and the drive became infected corrupted. When I try to repair it or verify it, I get an error message.