Long-Term Ills Tied to Bad Food | Arthritis Information

 

Over the past five years, Sarah Pierce has suffered repeated kidney failure, spent three years on dialysis, had the plasma in her blood replaced twice, and lost a fiance, friends and a job -- all because of something she ate.

Pierce, now 30, was infected with a toxic strain of bacteria, E. coli O157:H7, that can be spread through undercooked meat or raw produce. Today, she has a healthy kidney donated by her brother, a full-time job and a husband. But the medicines she takes to keep her body from rejecting her replacement kidney carry a high risk of causing birth defects, so she has ruled out pregnancy.

"I would have liked to have had children," she said.

Pierce belongs to a small subset of people who develop long-term health problems from food poisoning. Their ranks are growing. Over the past decade, as medical experts have sought out the source of certain chronic illnesses, they have increasingly found links to episodes of food poisoning, sometimes many years beforehand, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Campylobacter, a bacterium associated with raw chicken, is now recognized as a leading cause of the sudden acute paralysis known as Guillain-Barré syndrome. Certain strains of salmonella, the bacterium involved in the recent outbreak in Mexican raw jalapeño and serrano peppers, can cause arthritis. And E. coli O157:H7, a strain of an otherwise harmless bacterium that lives in animal intestines, can release toxins that cause hemolytic uremic syndrome, or HUS, a kidney disorder that in 25 to 50 percent of cases leads to kidney failure, high blood pressure and other problems as much as 10 years later.

This list is just the beginning of the many health problems some people are now attributing to food-borne infections.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/29/AR2008082902519.htmlI had more time to read this entire article in today's paper.  Here's more:

"What the classical medical literature says and what we've seen is not the same," said Donna Rosenbaum, executive director of Safe Tables Our Priority, or STOP, a nonprofit that represents people who have suffered serious food-borne illness.

Until recently, doctors were focused on the acute phase of food-borne infections, but since the 1990s, there has been "a more gradual recognition that some of the pathogens do have long-term [effects]," said Marguerite Neill, an infectious-disease specialist who teaches at Brown University. "We're already on the right track in terms of [saying] food-borne illness is more than diarrhea and may end up with long-term [illnesses]." Some doctors are now wondering, for example, whether food-borne infections trigger irritable bowel syndrome and colitis, said Andrew Pavia, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Utah.

However, long-term health effects of food-borne infections are hard to study, for a variety of reasons. First, it is tough to prove a link between some of these illnesses and later chronic conditions such as arthritis. Second, despite annual outbreaks across the nation, the subject hasn't attracted much public attention or funding, Neill said. Also, federal health-care privacy laws make it difficult for researchers to approach anyone who is not in their direct care."

Wow!  Three years ago, when my daughter first got sick, there was never anything like this in the mainstream media!  My, how times have changed.

Found this:  "Bacteria, Our Immune System, and Food-borne Illness"
http://trusted.md/blog/vreni_gurd/2008/08/30/bacteria_our_immune_system_and_food_borne_illness
"Furthermore, we actually need bacteria in our gut not only to digest our food, but also to help strengthen our immune system. We want lots of "good" bacteria in our gut, to help fight the bad bacteria like Listeria should we come in contact with it. If all our food is sterilized, we can't get adequate good bacteria from our food to help keep us healthy."

(author's bolds, not mine)
Suzanne2008-09-09 06:58:19I was interested in this news when it came out earlier in the year because, while it sucks we have yet another thing to worry about the long-term implications of, it's another example of how stealth pathogens can cause long term health problems. This may put stealth pathogens on the medical radar, stimulating more research into how they work. Many people, myself counting as one of them, believe RA is caused by being infected with stealth pathogens in the mycoplasma family.I have never been to concerned with the bug obession because if you are on a proper diet your body can take care of infections.( Alak vs acid) LuAnn, So your idea is you can get other so-called auto-immune diseases from food born illness stealth pathogens, but not RA?I believe that  there are many causes for autoimmune illnesses.   That there is a genetic basis as well as hormonal and environmental  factors that contribute to the onset of these diseases............. Lynn492008-09-09 18:15:29SnowOwl, I couln't agree with you more.  After I had stem cell and everything was wiped out of my blood, I was open to all kinds of infections.  There were two doctors who had differing opinions about exposure to bacteria etc. [QUOTE=SnowOwl] Adulterated, contaminated, and borderline-spoiled and spoiled foodstuffs are nothing new.  Gads, look at some "recipes" from ye goode olden days and wonder that they didn't all die off in agonies of food poisoning (which I've had twice in the past, nasty), instead of living to ripe old age after a lifetime of building homesteads and empires.  I tend to believe people in general seem to be more and more afraid of exposure to the world and are always sanitizing, sterilizing, and hiding out from conditions that would actually make them stronger for being exposed.  It's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, in the long term is counterproductive.  That doesn't include people who have compromised immune systems, they're already weakened and vulnerable, but on the whole I wonder if we as a society are setting ourselves up to be flattened by a "super bug" to which we have little or no resistance because of our overuse of antibiotics and our screening out as much of the world as we can avoid.[/QUOTE]

But people have been getting "auto-immune" illnesses and other chronic ailments since that time, so the idea that because we've been eating contaminated foods forever so they aren't anything to avoid doesn't make any sense.

That aside, because it's almost impossible to avoid contaminated foods anyway, I use antibiotics to successfully control a serious chronic disease. Is the idea I should suffer from the disease OR suffer the side effects of much stronger medications rather than use an old, patent expired antibiotic in case someday they are needed for a future super-bug? Are you aware that if there was a super-bug there are many newer generation of antibiotics that would be used rather than tetracyclines? Do you now that over 55% of tetracycline antibiotics used are used on CATTLE because they are eating corn instead of grass so their bodies get infected.

People don't seem upset that so much antibiotics are used uneccessarily on cheap beef, yet they get up at arms that someone uses them to control a chronic and painful condition, (a condition that many bvelieve are stealth infections----what are antibiotics made for). To me, that's just patently absurd.

Anyway, I hope, in view of your feelings, that you will switch to eating grass fed beef, so my necessary antibiotics work longer for me, in the purpose they were made for.
Copyright ArthritisInsight.com