Seafood Food Poisoning
Bite into scrumptious
seafood over dinner, enjoy it and a couple of hours later experience rumbling
in your stomach, diarrhea, and gastrointestinal problems and vomiting. End of a
lovely evening. A post-mortem of your condition will reveal that you ate raw
or undercooked seafood.
Seafood poisoning or seafood-borne illness is the
result of us eating fish that includes shellfish and finfish. Finfish such as
groupers, snappers, mackerel, triggerfish and barracudas give off certain biotoxins,
at a certain time of year, despite cooking. Warm water fish and those that
harbor near coral reefs also contain this toxin.
Kinds of seafood poisoning: Two other kinds of seafood poisoning occur
due to naturally growing toxins in fish: Puffer fish poisoning,
tetrodotoxin or fugu poisoning, and Scombroid poisoning.
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Seafood Food Poisoning
Puffer fish poisoning or tetrodotoxin:
You can contract this poison if
you eat fish in the Atlantic Ocean, Gulfs of Mexico and California and Japan.
- Symptoms:
Symptoms of puffer fish poisoning show up between 20 minutes and 180
minutes after eating the fish. Common symptoms are numb tongue, face, lips
and extremities, light feeling, dizziness, vomiting, headache, stomach
pain, diarrhea, muscular weakness, difficulty walking and slurred speech.
- Treatment:
Induced vomiting helps if the patient is awake and has eaten the fish
under three hours ago. Artificial respirators are necessary to avoid
paralysis.
Ciguatera poisoning: Worldwide, this is the most commonly known marine
toxin, harboring in contaminated reef fish such as groupers, snappers and
barracuda, grouper, and snapper. So, anyone eating such fish will suffer
from Ciguatera poisoning.
If you are holidaying in the Caribbean, or in Texas, Puerto Rico, US Virgin
Islands, Florida and Vermont, be careful you don’t eat the above mentioned reef
fish or you could suffer from this kind of poisoning for weeks or months.
- Symptoms:
Symptoms unique to this form of food poisoning are weakness, numbness in
the extremities, nausea, diarrhea, and sensation of temperature changes,
pain and death. Death due to Ciguatera poisoning is due to the victim
eating the most poisonous part of the fish—its roe, viscera, liver and
other internal organs. These symptoms are displayed between two to six
hours after consuming the fish.
- Treatment:
There is no treatment as such for this condition, except supportive care
that really works. Recovery usually takes a few days or several weeks.
Scombroid poisoning:
Also called Scombrotoxin, this form of
seafood poisoning or histamine poisoning develops after eating fish with high
histamine levels. Such fish include bluefish, abalone, mackerel, sardines,
tune, yellow fin, etc. Due to insufficient preservation or refrigeration or
preservation, bacteria in the fish convert the present histidine to histamine,
causing scombroid poisoning.
If you eat fish in tropical and temperate waters, you could contract scombroid
poisoning.
- Symptoms:
An hour after eating the poisonous fish, symptoms of scombroid poisoning
show up. They are identified by: burning or tingling sensation in the
mouth, body and face rash, persistent headache, hives, vomiting, nausea
and diarrhea.
- Treatment:
Take antihistamines like Benadryl and Cimetidine. Fortunately, the
symptoms go away soon enough and are not life-threatening.
