E coli

What you need to know:

Severe E coli - particularly in children and the elderly, who are at higher risk of dehydration - needs medical advice. For less severe cases, however, there are many natural remedies and complementary therapies that can help.

Replacing lost fluids is particularly important. You can buy commercially produced rehydration drinks, but it’s easy to make your own by adding 8 tspns of sugar or honey and 1 tspn of salt to a litre of boiled water and drinking a small glassful every half an hour. Children should be given a dessertspoonful every 10 minutes.

At first you probably won’t feel like eating - which won’t do any harm for a day or two. When you do feel hungry, avoid all dairy products for at least 48 hours and give your system a slow introduction to food by sticking to foods like ripe bananas, boiled rice, apples and dry wholemeal toast.

The most useful Herbs:

Bistort, fenugreek, agrimony and gotu kola
Slippery elm
Marshmallow
Bilberry juice
Cranberry juice
Echinacea

Homoeopathy

The homoeopathic remedies: Arsenicum album and Veratrum album could also be beneficial

Aromatherapy

Aromatherapy oils can help, too. Having a massage will probably be the last thing on your mind, but adding roman chamomile, lavender or melissa to the bath can be very soothing.

Other useful advice:

Once you’ve had one bout of gastroenteritis, you certainly won’t want another and there are several things you can do to reduce that risk.

Make sure all kitchen surfaces are kept clean
ALWAYS wash your hands after going to the loo
Defrost meat and poultry thoroughly before cooking - and make sure they’re cooked until the juices run clear. There’s one exception: rare beef is fine as long as it isn’t a hamburger - recent outbreaks of potentially lethal poisoning with the E coli bacteria has been directly linked to under-cooked hamburgers. Most meat is contaminated with this bug, which is on the surface. When you cook your steak or joint of beef, the outside gets very hot, killing off the E coli; when the meat is minced, the infection is spread and will be present in the middle of the burger
Never use the same chopping board for raw and cooked meat
Keep fresh meat and poultry separately in the bottom of the fridge so that blood can’t drip onto other food

When you’re travelling or on holiday - particularly in Africa and Asia:

Don’t eat undercooked meat or raw shellfish
Peel all fruit
Use bottled water only - and don’t have ice cubes in drinks if they’re made with tap water
Don’t eat salads
Beware the hotel buffet, which could have been sitting in the sunshine for hours providing an easy lunch for germ-laden flies.
Before you eat in a restaurant, look in the loo. If it’s full of flies where you can see them, imagine what it’s like in the kitchen, where you can’t.

Finally, a useful tip when the vomiting and diarrhoea subside is to make sure you regularly eat bio yoghurt. It contains useful bacteria called probiotics, which keep the digestion working efficiently and boost the immune system.

HOW SAFE IS YOUR FOOD?

It’s alarming that the number of reported cases of food poisoning in the UK has rocketed from 20,000 in 1985 to over 100,000 last year. Bearing in mind that only 10% of people bother to report episodes of food poisoning, this is just the tip of an alarming iceberg.

Why this dramatic increase? Throughout the food chain there are places where infection can occur. Intensive food production and the use of antibiotics in animal feed have produced many resistant strains of bacteria; huge expansion of food processing means more handling and greater risk of contamination; the mushrooming fast food takeaway business is frequently dirty and unhygienic; many home cooks know little about the fundamental rules of kitchen hygiene.

For most healthy adults a minor bout of food poisoning is an unpleasant inconvenience, but for the very young, the elderly, pregnant women and anyone whose immune system is weakened by illness, an attack of salmonella could be fatal.
These are the bugs which can cause serious food poisoning:

SYMPTOMS	PROBABLE CAUSE	BUG RESPONSIBLE
Vomiting within an hour of eating the suspect food	Cooked rice not sufficiently reheated	Bacillus cereus
High temperature, stomach pain, nausea and bloody diarrhoea in two to six days	Raw chicken blood contaminating other food	Campylobacter
Headache, diarrhoea and stomach cramps within six to twelve hours	Gravy, stuffing, stews or mince left for too long in a warm room or oven	Clostridium pertringens
Violent vomiting and diarrhoea within 12 to 72 hours	Undercooked burgers, contaminated milk, water or cheese	E.coli NOTE: If you contract this condition you may need to be taken into hospital as there’s a chance you might get kidney failure.
Flu-like symptoms which occur from four hours until several days after infection	Soft, unpasteurised cheeses and pates - which pregnant women should avoid anyway	Listeria
Abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhoea and high temperature within eight to 36 hours of infection	Under-cooked poultry and eggs	Salmonella NOTE: This infection can be very serious in pregnancy because the mother-to-be could dehydrate, causing miscarriage
Violent vomiting often with hours of eating the infected food	Polluted water and eating raw shellfish which have lived in polluted water	SRSVs (normally known simply as small round structured viruses)

Hygiene hints for home

** Dish cloths, even disposable ones, are the perfect breeding ground for bacteria. Boil at the end of every day, dispose of disposables, but best of all use once only paper towels to avoid cross-contamination.

** Always wash hands before and between handling different foods – wet with warm water, apply soap, rub hands together for at least 20 seconds and rinse thoroughly. Dry with disposable paper towel.

** Wash knives, chopping boards and counter tops in hot soapy water between preparing
different foods.

** Never allow household pets onto kitchen worksurfaces or to eat off plates or bowls which you use yourself.

** Whilst shopping keep raw meat, poultry and seafood separately wrapped and apart from other food in your trolley.

** Keep cooked foods at the top of the fridge and raw meat, poultry and fish at the bottom.

** Never put cooked food on a plate or dish which previously held raw poultry, fish or meat.

** Don’t use the same knives and chopping boards for raw and cooked foods.

** All poultry and burgers must be cooked right through until there are no pink areas.

** Use a meat thermometer. Cook roasts and steaks to at least 145 degrees Fahrenheit, whole chicken or turkey to 180 Fahrenheit, and burgers to 160 Fahrenheit. If you’re eating out, break open children’s burgers and do not let them eat them if pink. It is safe to eat underdone steak or roast; minimum 145 Fahrenheit; as E coli and VTEC are on the outside which gets much hotter. When meat is minced these bacteria are spread throughout the burger so temperature must reach at least 160.

** Cook eggs till firm, not runny, unless organic, free range and known to be salmonella free, or using pasteurised egg; available in supermarkets in the new year.

** Unless frozen packaged foods say they can be cooked from frozen, make sure they’re thawed first. Frozen poultry should be left to defrost very slowly in the refrigerator, never try to defrost poultry in hot water.

** Be very careful with microwaves. There may be cold spots where bacteria are not killed. If there isn’t a turntable, switch off and turn the dish by hand at least twice during cooking. Burgers, meat and poultry are safest with conventional cooking methods. If the instructions on a packet are not clear, or you do not know the wattage of your microwave oven, check with the manufacturer.

** Fish should be cooked till it flakes easily with a fork and turns just opaque.

** When reheating soups, gravy and all sauces, they must be brought to the boil. Other reheated leftovers should be cooked thoroughly to a temperature of 165 Fahrenheit.

** Hot food should be kept above 63°C.

** If your fridge doesn’t have a built-in temperature gauge, buy a thermometer and make sure it’s always between 0 and 5 degrees C. Get another for your freezer and keep it below minus18C.

** Don’t take chilled or frozen food on a tour of the shopping centre. Use a proper cold bag and get them to your own fridge or freezer as soon as possible.

** Never re-freeze previously frozen food.

** Make sure you remove all stuffing from cooked chicken or turkey before storing it in the fridge; it’s actually better to cook the stuffing separately if you anticipate leftovers.

** Cold food should be kept below 5 degrees C

** Cooked food should be covered and cooled as quickly as possible and refrigerated within two hours.

** Never defrost food on the kitchen counter; put it in the fridge, and that goes for marinating dishes too.

** If you’ve got a lot of leftovers put them in several smaller containers for more rapid cooling in the fridge.

** Don’t overfill your refrigerator; it’s the circulating air that keeps your food at the right temperature and safe.

High profile outbreaks from restaurants or food shops get lots of publicity, but most food poisoning happens in the home. You can’t tell just by looking or smelling whether your food is contaminated. If in doubt throw it out is the safest bet. Wash everything, even prepacked and washed vegetables, and particularly salads, the Food Standards Agency found serious contamination with Salmonella in more than a thousand samples of ready-to-eat salads. The combination of packing fresh food in gas and keeping it refrigerated may help it look fresh even though it’s contaminated and past it’s best. Pre-cut and packed vegetables may look great but still give you a dose of listeria.

Finding a hair in your soup may put you off, but it’s not likely to do you anything like the harm of not washing your hands when you’ve been to the toilet or changed the baby’s nappy.

Thirty years ago it was safe to eat steak tartare (raw minced beef) served with a raw egg in the middle of it, you could have enjoyed your steak or roast beef running with blood if you liked it, children could lick a finger dipped into the cake mix and we didn’t get sick.

Every time someone does something to the food you eat there’s a risk of contamination. Every time agribusiness and factory farming find yet another way to speed growth, increase productivity and maximise profit there’s a risk to your health. To minimise these risks buy as much as possible from local sources, direct from farms you know or farmer’s markets, or from butchers, greengrocers, and fishmongers who you trust. To minimise the risks still further, go as organic as you can

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The information provided by WIS is for guidance only. Whilst it is based upon the expert advice of leading professionals, and extensive research, it is not a substitute for diagnosis by a qualified professional. Always consult your doctor, pharmacist or qualified practitioner before making any changes or additions to prescribed medication.