Symptoms of Food Poisoning

Series Summary

Food poisoning can catch you at the restaurant or even in the safety of your own home. But you can take significant steps to prevent it. Wash your hands, keep your serving utensils and plates clean, and store your food properly and you may never get food poisoning. But just in case you do, watch this free series of food safety videos to ensure that you know how to handle the situation should it come up.

In this free series of healthy eating tips, a medical professional will explain the causes of food poisoning, tell you what to do in case you do get it, but best of all, she will outline the steps you can take to prevent it. Dr. Susan Jewell demonstrates how to prepare and store your food the safe and healthy way, including tips on how to clean out your fridge. But if you do get food poisoning, when should you go to the doctor? You will learn the symptoms of the overnight variety of food poisoning, but also the telltale signs that you need to get to the hospital right away. You will learn the dehydration test for food poisoning and even tips on what to do if you come down with a case of it in a foreign country.

Video Transcript

"Hello my is Dr. Susan Jewell and on behalf of expert village I am going to talk to you about how to recognize and how to reduce the risk of getting food poisoning. Now food poisoning, the cause of food poisoning can be many causes. There are many different germs and bacteria there that causes food poisoning and each presents it's own signs and symptoms. Now, if you go down to here you could see a table and you see a table of different types of germs and bacteria, on this column here. And where there usually found in this column, the middle column. And in this column it's going to show you signs and symptoms. Now the most common kind of food poisoning caused by a bacterium called staphylococcus and this usually is found in meats and dairy. Like dairy, milk that's found in cream that's used in mayonnaise. And usually what happens is that this bacteria forms a toxin in the food and when you ingest the food, then you're going to get the food poisoning. This particular signs and symptoms from this bacteria you're going to see that the symptom is very abrupt, it comes on in about six hours after eating the contaminated food and you're going to get vomiting within 1-8 hours. Now usually, this is, it clears itself but if it doesn't you can go to the doctor. Other common germs and bacteria causing is, Bacillus and this is usually found in re-fried rice and other things are like clostridium, which is found in re-warmed meat. So very careful when you re-warm meat that you actually heat it up really well. Just some of the examples of types of different types of pathogens that causes the many different types of food poisoning. Now in the previous clip we had talked about what causes the different types of food poisoning from different types of bacteria and germs but some of the signs and symptoms are similar. In terms of, most patients are going to come into the ER, see their doctors because they’re complaining first of all of nauseausness or vomiting. They are going to get flatulence, some germs going to cause diarrhea, some of the germs cause bloody diarrhea, so maybe you'll see blood in the diarrhea, redness in the diarrhea itself. Now some of the bacteria that cause food poisoning can cause more severe symptoms than others. Now, when you are, you have low grade fever, and when you have abdominal cramps really painful cramps associated with also vomiting then that's a sign that the condition is getting very severe and you need to go straight to the ER and get treated, so you can get antibiotics or some medication to better treat that. So, these are some of the signs and symptoms that most patients commonly complain of when they have food poisoning."