[Paddlewise] Food Poisoning

There were two incidents of food poisoning on my trips this summer.

In August, my SO and I got hit on the ninth night out, me much worse than
her.  We were puzzled as to the source:  we had consumed no mayo, no egg
products, no unpreserved meats, etc.  We winnowed the likely sources down to
these:  1. possible contamination of tortillas in handling; or, 2. possible
bacterial growth on a bell pepper which had been slaughtered the day before
and allowed to sit overnight in a hatch.  (This was the only event I have
experienced in some 5-6 seasons of many multi-day trips in temperate
conditions:  food stored against the hull while traveling -- water temps in
the 50-55 F range, mostly.)

In a mid-June trip, the victim was a woman who ate mussels from the same batch
as the other five of us, gleaned from the same rocks the rest of us picked
from, cooked en masse with all the other mussels.  She got pretty sick in the
night, but recovered the next day well enough to paddle eight miles, and then
do a night paddle.  Can one lone mussel be heavily contaminated, in the midst
of others which are not?  This trip was before the algae blooms hit our area.

What is the experience of others?

And, what precautions do others take to minimize the risk?  We wash hands
before food prep, minimize the time between filleting fish and consumption,
filter water sources, wash dishes in salt water, rinse them with fresh, and
allow to air dry inverted or hanging in a mesh bag (to keep critters out).

Oh, yeah, on that August trip, there was some weird brown algae growing in one
of our water bags, but I doubt that was the source of our problem, because we
had been drinking from it for days before we noticed the brown stuff.  Yeah, I
know it sounds gross, but we decided if it had not hurt us by that point, what
could it do now?  Anybody ever had that stuff growing in their water?

-- 
Dave Kruger
Astoria, OR
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