Have you or a loved one ever had food poisoning?...
Some time around 1995 me and my family travelled back to China for a vacation to revisit the some of the places we had lived in in the 80s. Actually it was 1/2 a business trip as my father was there representing his college, they were trying to set up ties between his college and one in China in order to set up a student transfer program. Anyway one night the college treated us to dinner at a nice new seafood restaurant, run by Taiwanese. Pro tip it's rarely the place you THINK is going to make you sick that ends up doing so. We lived in China during the mid 80s when food sanitation was even worse than in the 90s and way worse than today, and today it's not exactly good in a lot of places. But despite eating out all the time, including lots of street food, we never so much as got a little sick. Same thing goes for Malaysia and other places we lived in. But this time was different. Luckily for me and my mother we weren't at the restaurant, but my father was. From his account he believes it was the clam soup that did it. He even remembers it being not very hot. Next day the vomiting began, and didn't stop for days! Quite a few people at the table fell ill and the symptoms were basically liquid gushing from both ends non stop. I'm talking the kind of thing where you visit the toilet and don't know which end to aim at the bowl 
We can laugh at it now but it wasn't funny back then.
At one point he had lost so much liquid, and had such a high fever, that he was delirious and we were worried for his life. The people from the local university who had treated us to the meal were of course mortified at what had happened, but they also urged us NOT to go to the hospital. Even by the mid 90s China's hospitals were still notorious places, the locals knew to stay away from them if they could. Clean needles, and supplies were a foreign concept, the reason is they just couldn't afford them. China back then was much more a 3rd world country than today. At first we listened to them but eventually my fathers condition had deteriorated to the point where we really felt we had no other choice, and another local friend urged us to do the opposite and go!
The hospital really was something rather primitive. Rooms consisted of a thin rickety cot and even ricketier side tables. Otherwise the rooms were bare. The whole hospital reeked of strong antiseptic cleaner, which was actually probably a good thing but it felt like being inside a bottle of formaldehyde! My father vaguely remembers a nurse coming in and stabbing his finger with a rather rusty looking implement and inserting an IV fluid line. There he stayed for the next 48 hours or so. Amazingly the next day he had made a 180, he was up and talking and lucid again. The IV fluids had done miracles for him. They also had a tray of warm canned sprite that he was religiously drinking from. Within another day he was almost completely back to normal. Needless to say the incident left a mark on us though as at the worst we weren't 100% sure he would survive. Looking back on it now he probably would have but it's still a scary position to be in when in a foreign country. Like I was saying above it's rarely the place that you think will make you sick that ends up doing so. In fact some of the safest food overseas may look the dirtiest. Street food for example is usually fine, though it may give you the "runs". Stay away from seafood unless you are visiting a place where ALL the locals seem to frequent. Actually fish, shrimp and the like are usually ok, but be VERY careful of shellfish!! And follow your instincts, if the place doesn't have any locals there don't eat there! Aside from these simple rules I'm not all that careful when I eat overseas, including all over Asia.
Have you or a loved one ever had a food poisoning scare?
= new reply since forum marked as read
I woke up in the middle of the night and immediately vomited all over my bedsheets. Right after that I had severe diarrhea, which repeated itself multiple times throughout the night. Though by the next day I was mostly fine.
Hey, you asked... 
My parents were visiting from overseas..
My mother went into my pantry to cook my favorite meal...corned beef and rice - I only had corned beef in a tin - so she used that...
she flavors it, cooks with onions and a dash of this and that...and presto, it's delicious...
I had two large helpings, my father is not a meat eater,so she prepared fish for him and she also had a small bite of that and the corned beef..
It's the middle of summer,DC is hot and humid at its finest...but instead I am curled up in a fetal position, shivering,cold wrapped up in a blanket..and I look grey..nothing is staying down, I end up at the Hospital...
To this day,even if I look at corned beef, I get a gag reflex...I was the only one that got sick that night, so I joke in the family that about the night my mum tried to whack me (in reality, the expiration date on the can was over 4 years old)
To this day,I have not been able to go near corned beef, even just smelling it make me want to heave...
You don't have good luck with the food 
Sounds like a couple of scenes from a thriller Yeah my father said he felt like he almost wanted to die as well.
It was horribly hot out, and we had been running errands all day. We stopped at a local Taco Bell, which we'd often eaten at before.
We bought some food and ate it, everything seemed fine. My husband was still hungry, so he went back in for another Burrito Supreme. He came back with it, and asked me if I wanted a bite. I said sure, took a bite, and promptly spit it out. I told him I thought the sour cream was spoiled, and suggested that he go back in and exchange it. He didn't want to spend the time doing that. I then suggested that he should throw the burrito out. He ignored me, and ate it anyway. 
He wound up very sick...couldn't keep even water down for several days. I was seeing a naturopathic doctor at the time. At my next visit, my husband asked me to ask the doctor what he should do.
The doc said that my husband should mash up half of a banana, and mix it with plain, unsweetened yogurt, and eat nothing but that until the cramping and other unpleasant symptoms had subsided. It took 2 full weeks before my husband's stomach was healed enough to eat other food. 
