[SchroedingersCat]

In a moment of weakness, I ate a fast food burger last Saturday. Early Monday morning I awoke with severe intestinal distress. This quickly progressed to debilitating, watery, bloody diarrhea. This lasted until Wednesday morning, leaving me weak as a kitten and barely able to take care of myself. Having had e. coli poisoning once before, I know I face about two weeks of recovery before I will back to something near normal.

The CDC has some interesting stat's about food poisoning:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')o better quantify the impact of foodborne diseases on health in the United States, we compiled and analyzed information from multiple surveillance systems and other sources. We estimate that foodborne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year.

[eastbay]

1. Avoid any animal eating unless you've 'harvested' it yourself. That's a good place to start.

2. Wash fruit and vegetables properly.

These few steps should greatly reduce the chances of acquiring food poisoning.

[Fishman]

Scroed,
You are going to have a tough time when rats are the best source of protein. Growing your own still requires it to be cooked, e coli is ubiquitous. Its the antibiotic resistance that growing your own helps prevent

[rangerone314]

Ignorance will also hurt people too. I thought I knew a bit about plants and food until I cooked dry red kidney beans (instead of the usual ones in the can) for chili.

There is a toxin in red kidney beans that is neutralized by cooking at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time. I didn't cook them long enough at high enough.

That gave me the $H1Tz every 10 minutes for several hours. My wife had a less severe case of that symptom, as she was lucky and puked 3 or 4 times early on.

There are lots of edible plants that are actually toxic unless cooked quite well: skunk cabbage, tapioca root etc. Lot of edible stuff also that has toxic PARTS like rhubarb and tomatoes (the leaves).

[Pretorian]

well, if you eat skunk cabbage and tomato leaves, you shouldnt really be complaining about food poisoning.

[rangerone314]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pretorian', 'w')ell, if you eat skunk cabbage and tomato leaves, you shouldnt really be complaining about food poisoning.