Dirty Food Handlers
Perhaps the pork wasn’t too pink
Doctors are human and most of them mean well, but they are subject to propaganda just like the rest of us. Their pronouncements, therefore, are often politically correct even if they don’t always make sense.
Take this story for example: a friend of mine told me recently that he had had severe diarrhea, nausea and vomiting the previous week. I asked him what the doctor had to say. “He said, after asking me what I had eaten that day, that it was the pork.”
Realistically, the pork was the least likely culprit in the list of foods he had eaten. He ate beans and rice, tomato, cucumber, mayonnaise, and onion, then flan de leche for dessert (a form of custard).
Trichinosis doesn’t happen often these days, and the only way you can get it is from eating underdone pork. People just don’t eat rare pork. And no one I have ever heard of eats pork raw. So I told him his illness was probably caused by some organism, such as staph, salmonella, or hepatitis A (not the kind you’re thinking, hepatitis A is a very benign condition that clears up on its own without any treatment, as is true of most intestinal infections. Hepatitis B and C are a different matter.)
At any rate, the criminal here is not the organism, viral or bacterial, or pork, but a dirty food handler. Restaurants don’t like to spend a lot of time examining their food-handling employees. They give them written instructions, according to the law in a particular state and that’s about it.
It’s safer to eat at home, but not as much fun.
Ironing out the misconceptions,
William Campbell Douglass II, MD
