How do I narrow down what I ate made me sick?

Factual Questions
1

I felt barfy all day yesterday, and I’m sure it was something I ate.

I had skipped lunch, the day before, so do I blame it on the McDonald’s breakfast burrito I grabbed on my way to work in the morning, or the Tuesday Taco Special I ate at 6:30pm at the movie theaters?

My first symptoms I noticed about 11pm, a general feeling of I might be getting sick and drinking a lot of extra water just in case.

I never did actually barf but I wasn’t hungry and managed to eat some chicken soup for dinner. And now today I’m all good like nothing ever happened.

2

Did you have a stomach ache or anything like that? Headache?

If so it’s probably an abdominal migraine. I get them sometimes too and they are the pits.

3

That’s easy. Tomorrow, eat nothing but McDonalds breakfast burrito. If you get sick, mystery solved. If you don’t, eat nothing the next day but Taco Specials (just to be sure). If you still don’t get sick, it was just in your head.

4

Since many of the meals you ate fall into the range of the incubation period for typical tummy bad guys, short of testing the food, you can’t really know exactly what made you sick. Heck, your hands could have been dirty and you could have made yourself sick.

5

LOL @ Skammer

I did not have a headache until I left work early and headed home, then ate aforementioned Soup. Headache could have been from not eating…

Thanks Philster, I wouldn’t have even bothered to ask but for the whole Skipped Lunch thing making me wonder if it would be more obviously the breakfast or dinner, but I guess the time range of possibility is large after all.

6

Could possibly still be a migraine. However I doubt it to be honest.

7

Why blame it on food? You say you skipped lunch. Why? What else is going on in your life?

8

Even this isn’t guaranteed to work, since the burrito/taco from yesterday may have been contaminated by a careless worker, but todays is not.

To actually track it down, experts either have to have samples of the suspect foods to test, or enough people reporting the sickness to find a common place where they all ate. That can often take quite a bit of work.

Politics can play into that too. A few years back, our state epidemiologist had identified the source of a food poisoning epidemic, but was prevented by the republican governor from identifying it publicly – he claimed they needed more proof than the expert said. So they waited a few days, and several more people got sick from it. Finally they identified the source, either because these additional cases provided enough proof, or because it was being leaked to the news media anyway. Then they told people to not eat any that was in their house.

The source was bad batches of ice cream made by a local company – one that just happened to have made big campaign contributions to the governor. But of course, that had nothing to do with the governor holding back the recall of their contaminated product – right!