Re:Where you place your food in the fridge does matter
by Jedd on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @03:30PM
(#21274466)
> Unless the rate at which eggs are being treated like this is changing, why would the increase in food poisoning manifest slowly over time? Why aren't we seeing it right now?
I suspect the rate at which eggs are being treated like this is in fact changing.
Other complicating factors include - various consumption rates and that earlier-consumed eggs are less likely to cause a problem, the difficulty of tracking back root cause on fungible items like eggs, where people typically discard the original container (with manufacturer, batch number, BB/UB dates, etc) and relocate into the egg compartment, the fact that in Australia most people put eggs in the fridge in any case, which will partially mediate the problem of condensation causing bloom damage for the day or two prior to them buying the eggs, and so on.
> Maybe if people aren't actually getting sick at the predicted rate, there's a problem with the theory.
More a hypothesis than a theory.
Identifying incident rates in an urban population for mild food poisoning is tricky, as there's no convenient way to acquire that data, further the lack of reporting, self-assessment / diagnosis shortcomings, centralised knowledge repository, confounding correlations, let alone then trying to identify what item actually caused the problem in any given person.
It's only about twenty years ago that people in Sydney AU had to boil their water for several months as there were two parasites - cryptosporidium and giardia - that were discovered to be rampant within the supply here. Prior to actual detection, over a good length of time, plenty of people were suffering stomach problems, often geographically grouped (I believe I heard at the time) just a lack of regulatory testing and difficulty in obtaining, let alone correlating data, hid the problem for a long time.
My hypothesis is based on the fact that those same two problems manifest in this case.
I suspect the rate at which eggs are being treated like this is in fact changing.
Other complicating factors include - various consumption rates and that earlier-consumed eggs are less likely to cause a problem, the difficulty of tracking back root cause on fungible items like eggs, where people typically discard the original container (with manufacturer, batch number, BB/UB dates, etc) and relocate into the egg compartment, the fact that in Australia most people put eggs in the fridge in any case, which will partially mediate the problem of condensation causing bloom damage for the day or two prior to them buying the eggs, and so on.
> Maybe if people aren't actually getting sick at the predicted rate, there's a problem with the theory.
More a hypothesis than a theory.
Identifying incident rates in an urban population for mild food poisoning is tricky, as there's no convenient way to acquire that data, further the lack of reporting, self-assessment / diagnosis shortcomings, centralised knowledge repository, confounding correlations, let alone then trying to identify what item actually caused the problem in any given person.
It's only about twenty years ago that people in Sydney AU had to boil their water for several months as there were two parasites - cryptosporidium and giardia - that were discovered to be rampant within the supply here. Prior to actual detection, over a good length of time, plenty of people were suffering stomach problems, often geographically grouped (I believe I heard at the time) just a lack of regulatory testing and difficulty in obtaining, let alone correlating data, hid the problem for a long time.
My hypothesis is based on the fact that those same two problems manifest in this case.