Food Poisoning

1. Healthy Eating Slideshow: Fat-Fighting Foods
2. Food Frauds Slideshow Pictures
3. Take the Diet & Nutrition Quiz

Medical Author:

Benjamin Wedro, MD, FACEP, FAAEM

Benjamin Wedro, MD, FACEP, FAAEM

Dr. Ben Wedro practices emergency medicine at Gundersen Clinic, a regional trauma center in La Crosse, Wisconsin. His background includes undergraduate and medical studies at the University of Alberta, a Family Practice internship at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario and residency training in Emergency Medicine at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center.

View Full Profile

Medical Editor:

Charles Patrick Davis, MD, PhD

Charles Patrick Davis, MD, PhD

Dr. Charles "Pat" Davis, MD, PhD, is a board certified Emergency Medicine doctor who currently practices as a consultant and staff member for hospitals. He has a PhD in Microbiology (UT at Austin), and the MD (Univ. Texas Medical Branch, Galveston). He is a Clinical Professor (retired) in the Division of Emergency Medicine, UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, and has been the Chief of Emergency Medicine at UT Medical Branch and at UTHSCSA with over 250 publications.

View Full Profile

• Food poisoning is a common infection that affects millions of people in the United States each year.
• Most commonly, patients complain of vomiting, diarrhea, and crampy abdominal pain.
• People should seek medical care if they have an associated fever, blood in their stool, signs and symptoms of dehydration, or if their symptoms do not resolve after a couple of days.
• Treatment focuses on keeping the patient well hydrated.
• Most cases of food poisoning resolve on their own.
• Prevention is key and depends upon keeping food preparation areas clean, good hand washing, and cooking foods thoroughly.

Food poisoning might be described as a food borne disease. Food that contains a toxin, chemical or infectious agent (like a bacterium, virus, parasite, or prion) and cause symptoms in the body are considered types of food poisoning by most investigators. Those symptoms may be related only to the gastrointestinal tract causing vomiting or diarrhea or may involve other organs such as the kidney, brain or muscle.

Typically most food borne diseases cause vomiting and diarrhea that tend to be short lived and resolve on their own, but dehydration and electrolyte abnormalities may develop. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 76 million people become ill from food related diseases each year resulting in 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths.