Show description

Infection with Campylobacter is usually mild. In cases that are serious enough to get reported to the CDC, which is a very small proportion of all cases, the most common symptoms are diarrhea, fever, and abdominal cramps. Bloody diarrhea is a symptom in about half the reported cases, and, rarely, the organism can cause bacteremia (bacterial infection of the blood) and a bone infection that leads to a form of arthritis called Reiter syndrome, in which pain in the joints can last for months and in some rare cases becomes chronic.

Since they don’t require oxygen, they can live comfortably inside a can of preserved food. C. botulinum is actually a group of seven separate organisms, labeled A through G, which can be distinguished by the type of nerve poison they produce. A, B, E, and (rarely) F cause disease in humans, and C and D affect birds and mammals. Type G, which was identified in 1970, doesn’t appear to cause disease in humans or animals. For reasons that no one completely understands, the types are geographically distributed—type A is most common west of the Mississippi, type B in eastern states, and type E in Alaska.

But then they took a look at the stew and found what they were looking for. The stew had been cooked, kept on the stove unrefrigerated for three days, and then eaten without reheating. The covered pot had provided exactly the kind of oxygen-free environment in which C. botulinum thrives. ” But food-borne botulism is very rare. While 60 outbreaks of salmonella poisoning were reported to the CDC in 1997, there was only one outbreak of botulism, involving two people, both of whom survived. Of course, there are always more unreported cases of disease than reported, and this number does not include the 80 cases of infant botulism reported in that year, a special kind of botulism infection that we’ll discuss in chapter 5.