Kentucky

The high cost of food poisoning is noted in this story of long term complications years later by those who had food poisoning.  I wonder if they same holds true for those with major acute infections with MRSA and VRE.   

This should be a reminder to those on juries and in the insurance industry that appearances and the present can be deceiving and that an external appearance that looks "fine" may hide a host of other issues such that more weight might need to be given to those reasonably foreseeable damages and not just those that are absolutely self-evident today.

Never forget that once upon a time the state of medicine was to bleed to death with leeches a former president of the United States (President Washington)! 

Here is the Yahoo/CNN story:

Food poisoning can be long-term problem

It's a dirty little secret of food poisoning: E. coli and certain other foodborne illnesses can sometimes trigger serious health problems months or years after patients survived that initial bout.

Scientists only now are unraveling a legacy that has largely gone unnoticed.

What they've spotted so far is troubling. In interviews with The Associated Press, they described high blood pressure, kidney damage, even full kidney failure striking 10 to 20 years later in people who survived severe E. coli infection as children, arthritis after a bout of salmonella or shigella, and a mysterious paralysis that can attack people who just had mild symptoms of campylobacter.

"Folks often assume once you're over the acute illness, that's it, you're back to normal and that's the end of it," said Dr. Robert Tauxe of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The long-term consequences are "an important but relatively poorly documented, poorly studied area of foodborne illness."

Click on heading above for entire story, plus some links on stories about "super bugs."