Avoiding Food & Water Illness during Travel
Travel is almost always accompanied by variety of exotic foods and people do make good use of these opportunities. They eat foods that they have never tasted or tested before and end up with unknown food allergies and sicknesses. People traveling on business tours end up paying their medical bills instead of their restaurant bills. The risk of food and waterborne illnesses during travel is a definite possibility if proper care is not taken during meals.
One must select food carefully as ingested materials provide a route for infections to penetrate the body. Infections like e-coli, dysentery, giardiasis, cryptosporidiosis, hepatitis A and norovirus. One should avoid raw foods like salads, rarely cooked meat and fish, as well as dairy products at places where the sanitation standards are not good. Travelers should avail food that are well and freshly cooked and from properly clean eateries. Street restaurants should be avoided at all costs.
When tasting an exotic food for the first time one should be careful to take only a small quantity at first and also take necessary measure so that medical help will be made available in case of any emergency.
It is not only food which might be the cause of an illness but exposure to contaminated water when the person is suffering from opens sores or ulcers will cause infection as well. Swimmers almost always end up drinking a mouthful or two of the water they swim in so the risk of infection from water contaminated with human or animal waste is a definite possibility.
It is always better to drink hot beverages as heat kills pathogens, so hot tea or coffee are much safer than the cool cocktails or a cold beer. Ice cubes made from contaminated water should be avoided at all costs as this alone will render all the other precautions taken by us ineffective.
Apart from this carsickness or seasickness are some of the other ailments, which may spoil our holidays.
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