Headaches, gas, muscle soreness, vomiting and diarrhea are all things that you feel when you are sick with a stomach ‘bug” why does it actually hurt so much? And what is happening internally as it goes thru your body?
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Your immune system is fighting an invasion of microbes that have snuck into your body through food. The vomiting and diarrhea is your body’s way of forcing out the contaminated food as quickly as possible. The body and joint aches come from your bone marrow producing more white blood cells to fight the bacteria before it becomes a life or death situation when bacteria enters the bloodstream and fever is your body’s way of playing chicken with the bacteria by turning up the heat so much that it damages the bacteria but it has to be careful not to go too much as that will cause brain damage.
As ironic as it sounds, it’s not the bug. That’s your body telling you “you messed up, and we’re gonna fix it”
For example, diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting are your body’s way of flushing your system. Poison can’t kill you if you propel the poison away from you as fast as possible. XD
Fever is one of your body’s ways to kill infections. Most microbes can’t survive intense heat, so your immune system heats you up like a furnace to burn the infection to death.
This feels bad for you because it’s technically killing some of your own body. Not much, but enough to make you feel weak and sore. Your body is trying to kill the infection before the infection kills you.
When you contract norovirus via oral-fecal route, only 18 virus particles are needed to infect you. As a result of these viruses attaching themselves to your digestive cells, within 72 hours the infected cells have multiplied and begin to inflame your intestinal wall, hence the cramping. The vomiting and diarrhea is your body’s way of forcing the norovirus from your body while the fever is your body’s mechanism of “torching “the bacteria from your cells.
Even after you’ve recovered, you spread norovirus particles in your stool for up to a week. The viruses can live up until 220 degrees Fahrenheit and up to 2 weeks on surfaces. It is not airborne thank God unless you’re within 9-15 feet of a vomiting incident (check out Larry the Vomiting Robot). Norovirus is very contagious.
The best way to prevent it is to wash hands before eating. It is especially common from October- April, and can only be killed by means of bleach, hydrogen peroxide and in some cases thymol. There’s a can of Lysol brand III that kills “feline calicivirus norovirus” if it sits for 10 minutes on a contaminated surface. While this is not exactly the same kind of norovirus that gives you the “stomach flu”, it’s part of the very- hardy caliciviridae family of viruses with their fortified viral envelope.
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OP on the floor currently in the bathroom curled up with stomach pain and just wants to read something 😂
there are a few things that people refer to as “stomach bugs” and each one works slightly differently.
* food poisoning: you eat some food that has a lot of bacteria in it. The bacteria have produced toxins. So it’s the toxins that are making you sick. Even if you cook the food and kill the bacteria, the toxins are still there. You get sick within minutes or hours.
* foodborne illness: you eat food with bacteria, and the bacteria start to multiply inside you. this takes longer, so the symptoms often take days to appear. the symptoms are caused by a combination of bacterial toxins, and your body’s immune response to the infection.
* gastrointestinal viruses: These are usually airborne. you don’t get them from food. People sometimes call them “stomach flu” but they aren’t the same virus as the flu.
One cool example of direct viral toxicity is that these infections (such as rotaviruses) reverse the binary function of intestinal lining cells, from absorbing water to secreting water, hence diarrhea. Most symptoms of infection are immune-mediated such as the examples given above—fever, histamine, inflammation (the first stage of healing btw, gets a bad reputation), but here you have an example of direct viral action on the function of a cell.
Having read through some other responses, it’s insightful to remember that fevers can also be examples of the variety of overkill responses in the immune system, adaptive for survival at the species/evolutionary level, but not always beneficial at the individual level. Suppressing fever in the early stages of viral respiratory infections for example can reduce (not prolong as someone suggested) the course of infection, because you’re cutting down the various sequelae of this inflammatory response. Fevers can absolutely be dangerous btw, see ‘serotonin syndrome’ for example, permanent brain damage is possible.
I have been having non stop gastroenteritis/food poisoning symptoms since getting COVID in early December and it is…the literal worst
I would love to know what is happening when your stomach has such great pains that it actually feels like someone is gripping and twisting your stomach sack. I have not seen a comment explaining these spasms yet.
Diarrhea: Under normal circumstances you eat a meal and it goes through your stomach and then to your intestines. When it gets to your intestines it is a watery mess not unlike diarrhea. Over the next 24 to 48 hours it slowly gets squeezed through your intestines losing water along the way and getting formed into a more solid poop.
When you have ingested something that may harm you, your body speeds up the trip through your intestines so the watery slop that went into your intestines has little time to get less watery and exits not as a solid poop but as diarrhea.
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