“there is more to food borne illness than the frequent commute to the toilet or to the local pharmacy down the street.”
In many quarters in this country, the outcome of a person with food borne illness is simply viewed as having the nasty and unpleasant symptoms of diarrhea, vomiting, nausea, tiredness, stomach upsets for a period of time after which recovery sets in with or without medical treatment and the victim gets back on with life. Or, less acknowledged, outright death and fatality of victims.
But there is an ominous and little known aspect of food borne illness that began to be considered some five years ago which may aggrandize the public health burden of food borne illness globally, Nigeria inclusive. This is the Long-Term Health Outcomes of Selected Foodborne Pathogens.
The Center for Foodborne Illness Research & Prevention (CFI), a US based non profit research and advocacy organization, released a report in 2009 that placed the spotlight on the long-term health consequences of five foodborne illnesses pathogens: Campylobacter, E. coli O157:H7, Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella, and Toxoplasma gondii.
According to the report, serious life-long complications like hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), the leading cause of acute kidney failure in children; paralysis; seizures; reactive arthritis; hearing/visual impairments and mental retardation have been associated one way or the other with these food borne pathogens.
To read the full report click here: CFI LTHO REPORT
Even though the authors of the report acknowledged that “this long-term health burden of foodborne disease is not well understood” and “additional research is needed to improve our knowledge about these diseases”. The study counters the common public perception that food borne illness is basically limited to the symptoms previously mentioned above and in rare cases fatalities.
That is to say there is more to food borne illness than the frequent commute to the toilet or to the local pharmacy down the street.
A 2012 case of a 7 year old girl that was left brain damaged and paralyzed from food poisoning in Australia sort of validates the hypothesis raised in the CFI report. To read the full story of this incident click here: Girl Paralyzed By Food Poisoning Traced To KFC Chicken
The implication of this for Nigerians is that our public health system, inadequate and already getting overwhelmed as it is, will yet have to cope with additional burden if the food borne illness problem isn’t addressed as a matter of great priority.
A pragmatic preventative approach to address the problem of food borne illness in this country through enforcing existing food safety legislations, Local Governments rising up to their statutory responsibilities of food business inspections, and most importantly continually creating public awareness about the food borne illness problem to counter the dearth of public awareness of this problem will spare our public health management system additional burdens that it simply cannot bear at this moment.
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