|
Food
Safety Guildelines
You
Can Prevent Foodborne Illnesses!
Foodborne
illnesses can fool you. When you're sick and up half the night with
a headache, nausea, vomiting and/or diarrhea, you probably blame
it on what you ate last. You may be blaming the wrong food, however,
for it can take 24 or 36 hours, even up to several days, for you
to get sik from some of the pathogens (disease-causing microorganisms)
that cause foodborne illness. You also might be surprised to know
that you could just as easily have gotten sick from food prepared
at home, as from eating food prepared elsewhere or from eating in
a restaurant.
Foodborne
illnesses affect millions of Americans each year. The Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention Estimate that in the United States
alone there are 76 million cases of foodborne illnesses each year,
and that these result in 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths.
You
can reduce your risk of getting foodborne illnesses by following
the Food Safety Guidelines on this website, and by remembering that
prevention of foodborne illnesses starts when you buy food, and
continues when you store, prepare, cook and serve the food at home.
It's
easiest to think about preventing foodborne illness if you think
of prevention in terms of five basic rules:
In
addition to these rules, home food preservation should be carefully
done. Follow the specific directions by clicking below:
Definitions
Foodborne illness is any illness
that comes from a food you ate. Foodborne infection is an illness that results from eating food contaminated by a pathogen,
which results in an infection in the person who ate the food.
All
foodborne illneses used to be called food poisoning. However,
food poisoning is the term used when a substance
that is poisonous to humans is consumed, including toxins produced
by some types of bacteria.
More
Definitions
A microorganism or microbe is an organism so small that it cannot be seen without a microscope.
Bacteria and viruses and some parasites are microorganisms. A
pathogen is something that causes illness, and
the word "germ" is generally used to mean the same thing.
Pathogens vary in their infective doses - the
number of the microorganism you need to swallow in order to become
sick. It takes fewer microorganisms to make you sick when a ppathogen
has a low infective dose.
A
case of foodborne illness is a single person
who is sick. An outbreak is when two or more
individuals fromo different households have a similar illness
from consuming the same food.
|
