Bad food bugs

Salmonella!
Picture from www.neighborhoodmarket.org and www.fda.org

I’ve often wondered how long it is between intake of bad food and getting sick: maybe partly because it is not at all uncommon to find questionable food in my frig. Recently though, I had a particularly good reason to do some web searching on food poisoning – ask me for more if you think you want to hear the story – and found a helpful U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) site.
There’s a page labeled “Bad Bug Book” found at http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~mow/app2.html that names particular pathogens, along with onset, duration, and symptoms of foodborne illness and natural toxins. You can go to the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition home page http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/list.html where we can learn anything we’ve ever wanted to know about food safety.