We usually see in the news “restaurant XXX causes 15 patrons to fall sick”. Assuming most of the customers don’t know each other nor have means to contact each other. Who’s asking the patients where they ate and who’s making the connection?
I ask because for all the times I’ve had food poisoning in my life, I’ve never been asked by the doctor where I ate.
In: 5
For most people food poisoning is just stomach aches, vomiting, diarrhea, etc. Most people don’t go to the Doctor for these symptoms and it mostly goes untracked.
What you’re asking about are health emergencies, where multiple people aren’t just sick, they are in the hospital and sometimes dying. In this case, in the US at least, we have a public health agency who is responsible for tracking the emergence of diseases within the public. Usually just 1 person getting hospitalized is enough for samples to be taken and the illness to be identified, and the agency is notified of this.
What happens is if it’s just 1 person, it gets logged and tracked and forgotten. If it’s 15 people in a week suddenly a “medical detective” gets assigned the case to find the cause and yes, they do interview the person and the family to find out the obvious things like where and what they’ve eaten recently. If all 15 people have eaten at restaurant X or purchased lettuce brand Y that’s pretty damning evidence.
Step 1 is usually to inspect the restaurant / company and see if they can find a smoking gun for illness. Step 2 usually involves politely requesting the company/restaurant close & clean up or recall the suspect food. You see this often in things like lettuce where suddenly there is no romaine lettuce in the country for 2 weeks, it’s all been recalled.
Anecdotal but a similar story is my sister who returned from backpacking overseas with a terrible GI illness. She didn’t get hospitalized but samples were taken and she was given medications. She was repeatedly contacted by local health and disease agencies for a few weeks because her sample was so “bad” they were worried she was about to be Patient Zero for an outbreak. (we were all fine and she pooped her brains out for 2 weeks)
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