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Food or foe? Illness lurks in every kitchen

Pathogens can infiltrate our guts, then wreak havoc on our bodies
After a summertime power outage, bacteria – one of the main causes of food poisoning – took over this Durango freezer.

In prehistoric times, the trouble with food used to be that you had to find it, kill it and cook it, then supplement your diet with grains and vegetables unimproved by salted butter.

Sometimes, the process backfired: The animals ate you, and vegetation took its revenge.

Though Durango’s supermarket aisles can get viciously competitive, in the modern age of industrial farming, microwave dinners and excellent refrigeration technology, humans are much less likely to die in their search for food.

Still, food can make you terribly sick, and, in the rare case, even kill you. In fruits, vegetables, cheese, bread and meats dwell microscopic but dreadful enemies, including E. coli, Listeria, Norovirus, botulism and salmonella, just to name a few of the major players in food poisoning.

“There are actually hundreds of millions of bacteria in food that might make you sick, plus pathogens and viruses,” said Greg Brandt of San Juan Basin Health Department.

He said these days, the danger posed to locals by food poisoning is mightily mitigated by both rigorous federal food-safety regulations and frequent unannounced restaurant inspections conducted by eagle-eyed health department restaurant inspectors.

But even a casual read of the restaurant inspections, which are published monthly in The Durango Herald’s Health & Fitness section, show just how easy it is to mishandle food.

In July, one restaurant was cited for violating health rules when the restaurant inspector observed an employee wielding a “beverage container” in “unapproved areas.”

Meanwhile, at another, there was “cross-contamination of raw to ready-to-eat food.”

And these are the professionals.

Wendy Rice, family and consumer science education agent with the Colorado State University Extension Office, said the threat of food poisoning is all but constant in amateur kitchens, where busy cooks will start unwrapping chicken cutlets from their packaging, get distracted by a child or called into work by a boss, then return, perhaps hours later, when millions of bacteria are swarming over the meat.

“People have to realize about room temperature and bacteria,” she said. “Bacteria will multiply, so that they double every 20 minutes at room temperature; and if it’s warmer, that process happens even faster. So suddenly the leftovers that you left out from dinner the day before for six hours are covered in 2 million bacteria,” she said.

Pain and prevention

In the Bible, Adam bit one bad apple and forever regretted it. While the consequences he faced – loss of paradise, trouble in his marriage and God’s enduring wrath – were by no means trivial, someone in the throes of severe food poisoning might think he got off easy.

Rice said the symptoms of food poisoning are hugely varied, including nausea, watery diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain, cramps and fever.

“Food poisoning starts with one of these pathogens getting into the gut, where the body tries to reject it – hence the vomiting and the diarrhea,” Rice said.

“But as it progresses, it crosses the gut and leaps over into the blood stream,” she said. “Now, it’s systemic, all over your body, and your body tries to fight it by upping its white blood cell count. So, you get the muscle aches, the headaches, the neurological stuff.

“At that point, some pathogens will cause fatalities,” she said. “In pregnant women, some kinds of food poisoning will cause stillbirths or miscarriages.”

To avoid this fate, Rice said it was vital for home cooks to follow these simple rules:

Keep counter tops clean and wipe them off often.

Don’t use the same cutting board for raw vegetables and meats.

Wash produce with a scrub brush, not in sitting water.

Cook everything thoroughly and at the proper temperature

Don’t rinse meats like chicken in the sink because the water ricochets all over.

Professionals

Anecdotally, there’s a lot of food poisoning in Durango eateries.

Brandt said his office regularly gets calls from people streaming from both ends complaining about the shellfish they had at a downtown restaurant or a bad batch of chicken bought at the supermarket.

But because diagnosing food poisoning requires testing a person’s stool sample, Brandt said it’s very rare that an afflicted local proves an allegation of food poisoning.

“Without a doctor’s examination, it’s just an educated guess,” he said.

Given the rarity of hard medical evidence, Brandt said health department investigators take it very seriously whenever multiple people independently lodge complaints about a single restaurant, especially when they’re complaining about the same dish.

In such cases, the suspicious restaurant will receive an impromptu visit from health inspectors.

“Usually, we try to inspect every restaurant twice a year. But depending on people calling us up and complaining and a restaurant’s risk category, a restaurant can get inspected a lot more frequently,” he said.

A restaurant’s risk category is determined by the kind of food it serves.

For instance, Brandt said restaurants that deal with raw, uncooked chicken are at much higher risk than establishments that use precooked chicken nuggets.

He said, often, food poisoning stems from sick servers.

“You shouldn’t be working if you’re sick,” he said. “It can contaminate the food, and other servers will get it.”

cmcallister@durangoherald.com



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