When your body senses it’s under attack, it works hard to fight off the threat. However, in the process, it might take a few blows itself. This scenario can play out if you develop food poisoning.
“The human body is a pretty amazing thing,” says Dr. Ali Jamehdor, an emergency medicine physician and the medical director of the Weingart Foundation Emergency Department at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California. “If something bad goes inside of your body — as far as eating something that has a high amount of viruses or bacteria — the first thing your body does is try to get rid of what you put in.”
Familiarizing yourself with the mainstays of food poisoning onset, symptoms, treatment and prevention can help you reduce your risks of developing food poisoning, or severe cases of food poisoning, should it occur.
[Read: Stomach Flu vs. Food Poisoning: How to Recognize the Difference]
What Is Food Poisoning?
Food poisoning is a type of illness that you can contract if you eat contaminated, often poorly prepared, foods. Pathogens in these foods pose a threat to your body, so, after you eat them, your body will react by trying to push them back out of your system — typically through spurts of vomiting or diarrhea. Vomiting or passing diarrhea may ultimately help you discard the harmful contaminant you ate and get you on the road to being food-poisoning-free. But while the symptoms are happening, you’ll likely feel sick and in pain.
Additionally, some people’s bodies go into overdrive when fighting off a foodborne illness, causing vomiting and diarrhea to continue for multiple days, or longer. These longer-lasting symptoms are no longer helping but harming the body, and can put you at risk for serious consequences like dehydration that could land you in the hospital — or in the most severe cases, at risk for death.
According to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 48 million people get sick with a foodborne illness each year in the United States. About 128,000 people in the U.S. are hospitalized with a foodborne illness, and 3,000 people in the U.S. die from foodborne illnesses, annually.
To avoid contracting food poisoning, it is important to be mindful about where and how you shop for food as well as how you cook and prepare your meals. While you should give your body a day or two to discard what it needs, it’s important to seek medical attention if vomiting and diarrhea continue for three days or more.
Food Poisoning Symptoms
Common symptoms of food poisoning include:
— Nausea
— Vomiting
— Diarrhea
— Fever
These symptoms can be tied to other conditions too, like a stomach bug, but when they are connected to food poisoning, the onset occurs shortly after you eat a problematic food.
Severe food poisoning occurs when symptoms last longer than three days, you’re unable to stop vomiting or having diarrhea, and/or have a high fever. Because someone with food poisoning is unable to keep food or liquids down, they can be at risk for extreme dehydration or malnutrition.
[READ: Rotavirus, Norovirus or Stomach Flu: What’s the Difference?]
Foods Most Likely to Cause Food Poisoning
Some foods most likely to cause food poisoning include:
— Undercooked foods
— Shellfish
— Spoiled foods
How Long Does Food Poisoning Last?
Food poisoning can last from a few hours to a few days. Symptoms — like vomiting — tend to arise about three to four hours after eating something that is contaminated, but in some instances, reactions can stretch to the six to eight hour range.
After symptom onset, people don’t usually experience food poisoning for longer than one and a half or two days, Jamehdor says. He encourages people who experience food-poisoning-induced vomiting for longer than three days to seek medical attention, by contacting their primary care doctor or visiting an emergency room or urgent care center if they need immediate medical attention.
You may need to see someone right away if you are severely dehydrated — which can be a result of ongoing vomiting and diarrhea — or if you’re experiencing blood in your stool, which could be a sign of an E. coli infection. If you are not sure if you need immediate medical attention, talk to your doctor about your symptoms over the phone and see what they advise — or, err on the safe side and visit an emergency room or urgent care center.
Consider seeking emergency care if you are experiencing:
— Bloody diarrhea, which could be a sign of an E. coli infection. This is almost always a sign to seek emergency care.
— A high fever, at or above 101 degrees Fahrenheit, not breaking within 48 hours.
— A high resting heart rate, at or above 110 beats per minute in adults, accompanied with a high fever at or above 101 degrees. This is a sign that you are dehydrated and could need IV fluids.
— An inability to keep down fluids, like water and soup, for three days or longer. This is also a sign that you are dehydrated and could need IV fluids. You may be lacking nutrients (from food) as well.
— If you feel that you can’t balance your symptoms with your food or drink intake.
[See: 8 Kitchen Items You Need to Replace to Protect Your Health.]
Food Poisoning Treatments
There are no medications to treat food poisoning, specifically, but there are options to treat your symptoms to help you get over your illness and ease your pain.
These can include over-the-counter antinausea medications like Pepto Bismol or prescription antinausea medications like Zofran.
“Pepto Bismol is really underutilized — and most people don’t think about it when they get something like (food poisoning),” Jamehdor says.
He adds that while Pepto Bismol can help ease food poisoning symptoms, it won’t be as quick to stop your diarrhea as some antidiarrhea drugs. He explains that bismuth, which is the active ingredient in Pepto Bismol, acts as a binding agent in your digestive system and decreases spasms that come with diarrhea. This helps overall bloating without shutting off your bowel movements altogether.
It allows your body to “continue to pass the ‘bad stuff'” while providing some relief, Jamehdor says.
And that’s a good thing. Though it may be uncomfortable, your body likely needs to pass this diarrhea in order to excrete the germs and get you on the road to recovery, Jamehdor says.
With that in mind, he discourages people with food poisoning from taking more targeted, stronger antidiarrheal medications, like Imodium, in the beginning stages. If symptoms linger longer than three days, however, these recommendations may need to be adjusted to help your body heal, Jamehdor says.
It’s important to call your doctor if your diarrhea or vomiting linger for three days or longer.
Hospital Interventions for Foodborne Illness
If you are dealing with severe symptoms of a foodborne illness, Pepto Bismol won’t be enough to get you well. Especially if vomiting and diarrhea have continued longer than three days, you can be dehydrated and in need of interventions like IV fluids. Further and more individualized treatments may be administered depending on your predicament.
Mitzi Baum, chief executive officer of Stop Foodborne Illness, an advocacy group that supports sufferers and survivors of foodborne illness, explains that people with severe foodborne illnesses are at times held in medically induced comas to allow their bodies a chance to recover. Baum works with many survivors of foodborne illness, including women who develop listeriosis — a foodborne bacterial illness — during pregnancy and pass this on to their babies.
“Foodborne illness is not something that you wish on anyone,” Baum says. “The pain can be excruciating and, of course, the symptoms of vomiting and diarrhea are horrible.”
She adds that vomiting and diarrhea are unpleasant even in the short term, but that people who have food poisoning for weeks or months experience a whole new level of discomfort.
Food Poisoning vs. Stomach Bug
Food poisoning symptoms can present similar to that of a stomach bug, which is also known for plaguing people with vomiting and diarrhea. However, there are some differences between the sicknesses. If you’re trying to understand if you have a case of food poisoning or a stomach bug, here are some things to consider:
1. What you ate beforehand — and when you ate it
Because food poisoning symptoms can begin about three hours after eating a contaminated food, think about the last meal you had before you got sick. Did it fall within this timeframe? Was it thoroughly cooked and handled with proper hygiene? Or were you eating something raw, undercooked, spoiled or perhaps handled in an unclean environment?
2. What illnesses are going around
Especially if you can’t pinpoint a recent red flag meal, consider if a stomach bug is circulating around the community or among people you know — and if so, if you think it is causing your symptoms.
3. What other symptoms do you have?
While vomiting from stomach bugs is often accompanied by body aches and chills, this isn’t always the case with food poisoning. If you are throwing up but don’t notice other hallmark symptoms of a stomach bug, it might mean you are experiencing food poisoning.
Other symptoms of a stomach bug that are not always present with food poisoning include:
— Body aches
— Sore throat
— Cough
— Congestion
— Fever, although this can occur with more serious cases of food poisoning, too
Is Food Poisoning Contagious?
Food poisoning is not contagious through skin-to-skin contact, but it can be contagious through bodily secretions, including vomit or diarrhea. This is because when people with food poisoning vomit or pass diarrhea, they are shedding remnants of the pathogens that got them sick so that they can become healthy. Germs can spread to others if proper hygiene isn’t practiced, such as wiping down surfaces and thoroughly washing hands after going to the bathroom.
“It’s really important for folks to understand that dangerous pathogens may be lurking in your food — so handle them all carefully, especially those raw proteins,” Baum says. “Make sure you wash your fresh fruits and vegetables, you’re cooking those proteins to the correct internal temperatures and make sure you’re serving your hot food, hot and your cold food, cold.”
Food Poisoning Prevention
For better or worse, much of food poisoning prevention is a task for food manufacturers, handlers or sellers — and not consumers.
Baum explains that food can become contaminated at the source — or along the manufacturing pipeline — so that it can have picked up dangerous pathogens before even reaching your refrigerator, or touching your plate. Because of this, her organization works not just to educate consumers about the importance of food safety, but to raise issues to state and local regulators and agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, who have more control over the issue.
However, consumers are not powerless to this issue, either, and there are actions you can take to reduce your risk for food poisoning. Some of these include:
1. Shopping at reputable grocery stores
2. Calling out uncleanly behavior or improper food handling, such as by reporting observed issues to store managers
3. Checking products expirations dates before you buy and consume foods
4. Checking the product seal
5. For meats or seafoods, being mindful of the smell
6. Following preparation instructions on the packaging label
7. Washing fruits and vegetables before use
8. Separating raw ingredients to avoid cross contamination
9. Washing utensils and cutting boards, and using separate cutting boards for different items
10. Cooking meats to approved temperatures — which you can verify by using a meat thermometer
11. Being mindful of FDA food recalls and discarding any recalled or expired products. The FDA maintains a list of food recalls and safety alerts.
“We shop with our eyes and our noses,” Baum says. “So look, smell, ask questions.”
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Food Poisoning: Prevention, Symptoms and Treatment originally appeared on usnews.com
