{"id":3940,"date":"2017-01-04T16:04:24","date_gmt":"2017-01-04T15:04:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3940"},"modified":"2017-01-04T16:10:24","modified_gmt":"2017-01-04T15:10:24","slug":"when-food-poisoning-isnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/3940\/","title":{"rendered":"When Food Poisoning Isn’t"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometime\u00a0commenter Bloke in Spain makes the following remark at Tim Worstall’s<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I suspect that \u201cfood poisoning\u201d is a lot less common than reports of it would suggest. I\u2019ve lost count of the visitors down here who reckons they\u2019ve suffered \u201cfood poisoning\u201d eating much stuff as the rest of us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I concur. \u00a0When I was a kid we had things called “stomach upsets” that would make you vomit and give you diarrhea for a day or two and (in our household) would see you confined to bed on a diet of dry Ryvitas and lemon squash until you got better. We’d also be given kaolin and morphine, a brilliant medicine which is now\u00a0hard to find\u00a0and has been replaced with Imodium which just bungs you up like concrete and does nothing for the pain.<\/p>\n

Anyway, everyone got these upset stomachs from time to time and in my adult life I get one about once every two years. \u00a0However, as part of a general trend towards irrationality, ignorance, and increased use of hyperbole among the general population I noticed some time ago that most people now think a regular stomach upset is food poisoning. \u00a0The first time I heard this was back in my catered halls of residence in Manchester University around 1997 or 1998 when a female student got sick after eating the grub that was served up in the canteen. \u00a0She claimed it was food poisoning, whereas the chef – who wasn’t student and hence had some sense – pointed out that several hundred other residents had eaten the same food and had not fallen sick.<\/p>\n

I remembered this when I was in Sakhalin in 2008 and I ate a meal in the canteen at the LNG plant that had me throwing up in the snow on the drive back to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. \u00a0I felt ill the minute I’d finished eating and the pain only got worse, and I wondered if the baked beans with bacon strips that I’d covered my mashed potato with (hey, this was on site in Russia) had been bad. \u00a0The illness barely lasted 24 hours and when I inquired two days later I found there was no mass outbreak of food poisoning among the staff and contractors so I concluded it was just a stomach bug.<\/p>\n

Food poisoning is fucking serious. \u00a0I’ve fortunately never had it, but I have spoken to people who have and aside from being easily capable of killing you it is something which lasts for several days and makes you wish<\/em> it would get on with it and kill you. \u00a0Just like a migraine is not a headache (another false equivalence people draw), and a cold is not ‘flu, an upset stomach is not food poisoning. \u00a0So whenever I hear people say they were off work for a day with food poisoning, I mark them down as a hysterical idiot or an ignoramus.<\/p>\n

A few years ago I was flying back to Lagos from Phuket and felt a surging pain in my stomach on the flight between Phuket and Bangkok. \u00a0I tried wishing the pain away and pretending it was indigestion but on the transfer bus from the plane and the terminal I felt so nauseous I almost passed out. \u00a0I found the nearest toilet and threw up mightily, making a right racket as I did so. \u00a0I then spun around 180 degrees and emptied myself from the other end. \u00a0You know how it is. \u00a0I had an hour or so to wait until my connecting flight to Dubai, and so took some Imodium and Alka-Seltzer hoping these would settle my stomach. \u00a0I kept these down for a few minutes and then threw the lot up again. \u00a0In such situations I simply stop eating believing, correctly or not, that if you don’t eat then the bug has nothing to feed on and will starve. \u00a0Even if this is bollocks I have found that eating nothing for a day will cure any stomach upsets I typically encounter.<\/p>\n

By the time I came to board the flight I was feeling a bit better, and so took my seat. \u00a0Only when we started rumbling down the taxiway I began to feel queasy. \u00a0I was sat with the window beside me on my right side, an empty seat beside me (thank God) and a middle-aged man was in the third seat beside the aisle. \u00a0As the engines roared for takeoff I felt the pain in my stomach flare up and for the first time in my life I reached for the air sickness bag, into which I threw up just as the nose wheel parted company with the tarmac. \u00a0I mentioned before I made a racket being sick, and for some reason I do. \u00a0Something to do with the air being pushed past the vocal chords, but I sound like I’m roaring like wounded bull. \u00a0I made so much noise that I could be heard by everybody on the lower deck of an Airbus A380 over the noise of four General Electric jet engines on takeoff mode.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, once we’d achieved the altitude at which the stewardesses can take off their seatbelts and stand up, they all came running through the cabin asking “Who the fuck was that?”, only using slightly more polite language. \u00a0I put my paw in the air and ‘fessed up (before handing them a lovely bag full of sick) and then somebody showed up with a clipboard and\u00a0started\u00a0bombarding me with questions. \u00a0They asked if I was airsick, and I said no, I have an upset stomach. \u00a0They asked if I was feeling ill before boarding, and I lied and said I merely felt queasy. \u00a0They asked me whether I’d eaten anything before, presumably thinking there was a possibility\u00a0I’d gotten to my age on\u00a0a diet of fresh air. \u00a0I told them I’d eaten part of a pizza back in Phuket, but\u00a0those who’d eaten the rest of it were fine (I’d called them and asked). \u00a0The stewardess with the clipboard looked at me and said “Okay, we’ll put it down as food poisoning from eating a pizza, then.” \u00a0She then told me I ought to\u00a0have\u00a0seen a doctor rather than get on a plane sick, which was sound advice if I’d\u00a0fancied spending 24 hours in the airport hotel at my own expense because any doctor would have yawned and said “nope, don’t fly” because it’s no skin off his nose. \u00a0I then got a bollocking for getting on the plane with “food poisoning” because we might have had to make an emergency landing, and there aren’t many places that an A380 can do that. \u00a0That was a good point in general, and an A380 being severely restricted in terms of where it can land in an emergency never occurred to me, but it annoyed me because I obviously didn’t have food poisoning. \u00a0Apparently there is no such condition as\u00a0a\u00a0stomach upset which can be put on the forms the cabin crew have to fill in every time a passenger gets sick.<\/p>\n

As it happened, I ate nothing and drank only water for the rest of the flight and by the time I was in Dubai I felt well enough to eat a little soup. \u00a0By the time I caught the next flight and arrived in Lagos, I was feeling fine. \u00a0That would not have been the case if I’d had food poisoning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometime\u00a0commenter Bloke in Spain makes the following remark at Tim Worstall’s: I suspect that \u201cfood poisoning\u201d is a lot less common than reports of it would suggest. I\u2019ve lost count of the visitors down here who reckons they\u2019ve suffered \u201cfood … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[92,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3940"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3940"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3940\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3943,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3940\/revisions\/3943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}