On October 6, 2003, Jeff Cook took his family out to dinner at the
Chi-Chi's Restaurant in the Beaver Valley Mall, north of Pittsburgh.
When his chicken-and-steak fajitas arrived at the table, they were
accompanied by the obvious—sauted peppers, onions, sour cream—and the
invisible—a helping of hepatitis A. Cook, 38, healthy and energetic on
that autumn evening, died of acute liver failure a month later.
Hepatitis A may have been the disease that ended up sickening 575
Chi-Chi's patrons and employees—and killing three—but a batch of green
onions was the carrier. Dirty food. The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention estimates that every day, 200,000 Americans contract food
poisoning. But Philip Tierno, Ph.D., a microbiologist at New York
University medical center and author of The Secret Life of Germs,
pegs the true eat-'em-and-weep rate at around 800,000 a day. "Everyone
in this country will have at least one incident of sickness this year
attributable to a foodborne virus, bacteria, or toxin," Tierno says.
Except that most of us won't know what hit us; we'll chalk up the
usually mild symptoms—nausea, diarrhea, cramping—to "that stomach flu
that's going around."
Scientists currently know of only one 100 percent foolproof way to
prevent foodborne illness: Stop eating. Or, almost as effective, obsess
over every morsel you bring to your mouth and whether it might be
staring back at you. But assuming you'd rather not die of slow
starvation or, worse, live like Nick Nolte, we present you with a third,
saner solution: Identify and sanitize the 10 dirtiest foods.
After considering incidence of foodborne outbreaks, relative danger of
the dirt, and how often the carrier is found on our forks, we came up
with a list of the edibles most likely to send your day spiraling down
the crapper. We then assembled simple strategies for decontaminating the
prime suspects—from the supermarket to the supper table—without
worrying yourself sick. And what if, as with Jeff Cook, someone else
does the cooking? We'll also tell you how to spot a dirty restaurant.
Add it all up and what we're giving you is a recipe—for clean living.
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