Suspected food poisoning from supermarket food

nails1

I bought raw chicken in a well known supermarket earlier today. Within a few hours of cooking and eating it I’ve been getting diarrhea,headaches and stomach cramps. The chicken was one day before expiry date. I haven’t eaten any other raw foods in past couple days or eaten out and I highly suspect it’s the chicken. I have the receipt, packaging and one of the cooked fillets that I haven’t eaten still in the fridge. What is best thing to do? Contact supermarket, hse or go to doctor?

prinzeugen

nails1 wrote: »

I bought raw chicken in a well known supermarket earlier today. Within a few hours of cooking and eating it I’ve been getting diarrhea,headaches and stomach cramps. The chicken was one day before expiry date. I haven’t eaten any other raw foods in past couple days or eaten out and I highly suspect it’s the chicken. I have the receipt, packaging and one of the cooked fillets that I haven’t eaten still in the fridge. What is best thing to do? Contact supermarket, hse or go to doctor?

Doctor. It may well be food poisoning but you could have become ill by not washing hands etc while handling it, rather than the chicken being off.

Biggest cause of food poisoning from chicken is lack of hygiene by the person cooking it.

Xterminator

Hi op

if the supermarket had a failure in the supply chain, then they may have a number of people with this problem. and it can happen. did you notice of the chick looked or smelt spoiled?

but it ismore likely that the preparation/cooking of the chicken can have caused the issue. on the balance of probabilities.

No harm in keeping any receipts from doctor etc and giving the supermarket a ring. Let them know what happened and if there were any out of pocket expenses.

if you are not happy with response you can also give food safety authority a shout. https://www.fsai.ie/makeitbetter/

Former Former

Raw chicken is absolutely teeming with bacteria, regardless of how fresh it is, where you get it etc. I'm not sure what you would complain to the FSAI or the supermarket about to be honest.

Don't mean to be unsympathetic, but if you got food poisoning, it was either poor hygiene during preparation or you didn't cook it thoroughly.

coylemj

Chicken is like milk - when it goes off, it goes off i.e. there's no halfway house. If you didn't detect a bad smell when you unpacked it, the supermarket sold you perfectly good meat. As noted above, raw chicken is teeming with al sorts of things that can cause an upset stomach, it's up to you to prepare and cook it properly.

Which also includes following the current advice not to wash raw chicken under a running tap as that just spreads the bugs all over your kitchen - you could have cooked the bird properly but left traces of the bugs all over your kitchen surface and contaminated utensils or other food.

Seems a very quick onset of food poisoning (a few hours)

meep

So many moons ago, my wife and I were part of a salmonelle outbreak. (never wish it on anyone - 1 week of crippling sikcness and 1 week to recover)

Anyway, it was interesting to see how it worked. We went to local GP who treated us but later that day had a call from HSE to find out details of where we'd eaten etc. They asked us to go back to GP with some samples etc.

Very co-ordinated adn joined up, I thought.

OP, at a minumum, you'd need to go to GP to have a record of the illness and, if they encounter several caeses clustered, there would be follow up.

We didn't follow up at the time as we';re mot litigious but I know some people who had young kids affected that did.

seamus

Deleted User wrote: »

Seems a very quick onset of food poisoning (a few hours)

This.

Upset that sets in this quickly is virtually always caused by something done during preparation. "Off" food or things like Salmonella you won't feel for a few days.

Even norovirus takes a good while. I remember having a chinese and then a few hours later I was stuck in the jacks and blamed the chinese, but realistically it must have been something I ate earlier in the day.

Poisoning (as in toxins, not bacteria) can set in that quickly, but I've never heard of raw chicken being toxic.

dudara

FYI - food poisoning doesn’t always come via raw food either. Any foodstuff that has been mishandled or stored incorrectly could be the cause. I’d be looking at what you ate about 12 hours previously as the possible culprit.

meep

seamus wrote: »

This.

Upset that sets in this quickly is virtually always caused by something done during preparation. "Off" food or things like Salmonella you won't feel for a few days.

.

I had a diagnosed/confirmed case of Salmonella and symptoms hit around 3.00am having eaten around 7.00pm