That chicken dinner? It might make you sick

By Tula Karras

updated 9:37 a.m. ET Feb. 11, 2009

Jenelle Dorner, 32, of Bloomington, Indiana, doesn’t eat chicken. In fact, she hardly eats anything. “Each night while I sleep, I’m fed nutrients and fluids by IV,” says the married mother of one. Eight years ago, Dorner developed gastroparesis, a condition that delays or prevents food from reaching the intestines, where nutrients are absorbed. The possible cause? A hearty helping of bacteria-ridden chicken she ate at a restaurant 14 years ago.

Her story is an extreme one, but poultry can make you sick as easily today as it did to Dorner when she bit into her destructive dinner. In fact, there is a 50 percent chance that the bird you bring home from the grocery store will contain Campylobacter (known as campy for short), the bacteria that was lurking in Dorner’s undercooked entrée. The pathogen, found in a chicken’s intestinal tract, causes no harm to the animals, but it can make humans very ill, sometimes fatally, if high cooking temperatures don’t kill it. Seeing as how the average American puts away more than 42 pounds of poultry per year (equal to 222 chicken breasts), your chances of getting sick are considerable. An estimated 76 million cases of foodborne illness occur each year in the United States, and during the past decade, poultry has caused more cases than any other individual food group, including vegetables, fruit, seafood and beef, according to data from the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a food and health watchdog group in Washington, D.C.

“Infections of campy are so common that many of us have probably already had it at least once,” says Robert Tauxe, M.D., deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Foodborne, Bacterial and Mycotic Diseases in Atlanta.

Dorner’s ordeal began in 1995, when she was a sophomore at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her father took her to a restaurant to celebrate her 19th birthday, and she ordered chicken. “I remember thinking it was slightly pink, but other than that, it seemed fine,” she says. Three days later, Dorner began vomiting and experiencing stomach pains and diarrhea. Doctors at the student health center suspected a virus and sent her home with instructions to stay hydrated. But her condition worsened. “I was running a fever, couldn’t keep anything down and had bloody diarrhea,” Dorner recalls. She returned to the health center, where they took a stool sample and admitted her to the hospital. Dorner’s lab work revealed that she had contracted campy. After taking the antibiotic Cipro, she felt better, but her digestive system was never the same. In 2001, Dorner began having severe abdominal pain and couldn’t eat a meal without vomiting, the first signs of her gastroparesis. During the next five years, her condition progressed to full-blown digestive failure. “My doctors won’t ever be certain, but they believe that my campylobacter infection 14 years ago could have weakened my digestive system and set the stage for the gastroparesis,” Dorner says. “I was completely healthy until I had that meal.”

Sick-o-meter How can you tell if your icky stomach symptoms are courtesy of a recent meal or something else? Check in with this cheat sheet. Tough it out at home if… You’re simply not feeling well or you vomited or had diarrhea only a few times, or if your symptoms are starting to resolve and you can keep down at least small amounts of liquid to replace lost fluids, says Charles F. Pattavina, M.D., spokesman in Bangor, Maine, for the American College of Emergency Physicians. You most likely have a virus that will pass in three days or so. Call your doctor if… Your abdominal pain is worse than a few cramps; or you are running a high fever; or you can’t keep anything down (not even sips of liquid) for 4 to 6 hours or you can’t keep down medications such as birth control; or you’ve been sick for at least three days; or you’re extremely thirsty and light-headed (an early sign of dehydration). It may be viral, and you may need antinausea drugs and hydration. Go straight to the ER if… Your stomach pain is severe or you’re dizzy; or your fever is very high (at or above 102°) and accompanied by chills and sweats; or you have blood in your stool or see it when you vomit. Ask about having a stool-sample test: If it’s positive for campy or salmonella, you’ll need antibiotics; plus, accurate tracking of food poisoning cases is essential to help the government monitor outbreaks.

Campy isn’t the only bug infecting chickens and the women who eat them. Between 2000 and 2005, rates of salmonella, another dangerous chicken-borne pathogen, spiked 80 percent in broiler birds. Although rates have declined slightly since then, the percentage of food poisonings from salmonella has remained steady over the past decade. And in addition to gut-ravaging bacteria, there could be another harmful hitchhiker on your roaster: Conventionally raised birds may also contain arsenic, a known carcinogen. “About 70 percent of broiler chickens in the United States are fed arsenic at some point,” says David Wallinga, M.D., director of the Food and Health Program at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), a nonprofit think tank focusing on farming and food policy, in Minneapolis. Farmers add arsenic to chicken feed in order to fatten their flocks — birds go from hatchling to slaughter in only six weeks — and to give the birds their pinkish hue. And the practice is actually legal.

The average person ingests an estimated 8.1 micrograms of arsenic a day from chicken, according to a study from the USDA. And when you add that to the small amounts of arsenic you can be exposed to from other sources, such as drinking water, dust and arsenic-treated wood, a steady diet of chicken could quickly become risky. “Chronic exposure [10 to 40 micrograms a day, research suggests] is associated with an increased risk for skin, bladder and respiratory cancer,” says Caroline Smith DeWaal, food-safety director at the CSPI. Richard Lobb, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council in Washington, D.C., told SELF that the arsenic found in some chickens could also come from environmental sources — insisting that there is no evidence that arsenic fed to chickens harms humans.

Along with arsenic, farmers are also allowed to lace their birds’ feed with antibiotics to control bacteria in crowded quarters. It sounds great in theory, but if you catch a strain of bacteria that was exposed to antibiotics in the chicken’s gut, and that strain “learned” to outsmart the antibiotics, then it will be harder for you to recover. “Antibiotic-resistant strains can last longer in your body and are more likely to lead to hospitalization,” Dr. Tauxe says. What’s more, these superbugs are on the rise, so even though the hens might be healthy, they may be making you sicker. (Lobb reinforced that “food safety is a top concern of the poultry industry” and that it has worked to adopt judicious use of antibiotics in its farming practices.)

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