It has been a while since I started this blog about stomach flu, or it looks like that to me, since I had stomach flu, survived the symptoms, got better and on the and get back to a normal lifestyle. What an privilege to be healthy today! What a privilege to be healthy at all!
If you have stomach flu, and reading this post, I want you to know that I continued writing this lines because of you, to help you understand what is going on with your belly, and by that help you get better.
Read about stomach flu, later may be to late!
In past days I was reading about this more than I have read in my whole entire life about anything, and now, I want to collect all this thoughts on this blog.
I don’t want to talk to much about what is stomach flu, since I think that everybody know it and are already aware of it. I would just shortly say that it is the same thing as gastric flu, and totally same thing as gastroenteritis. An inflammation and infection of stomach and intestines. There is no other explanation, and it is not worth to spend words on trying to be smart and say something new about it. It is that by definition and that’s all. However, if you wish to read more about it, here is my source for what is stomach flu.
There are some other other, more important things to talk about related to stomach flu, and those are causes, symptoms, treatment, how to prevent it, what are dangerous situations and so on. With this post, I would mainly like to say something more about dangerous situations of getting it and maybe a little more about causes, since cause is very serious topic and deserves far more than several lines. Did you know that causes are so serious that are treated as illnesses itself.
So let’s say you already know what is stomach flu, now I can tell you several things about what cause it! The main causes of stomach flu are divided in three groups by the type of microorganisms they belong to. So we deffer viral, bacterial and parasitical causes. Because of its causes stomach flu is very complex illness, and even its causes are took into account to be illnesses. This topic is very wide and I’ll write more posts about each of this causes. Now let’s go back to dangerous situations.
Proper washing hands can protect you from getting stomach flu!
In general, any situation that happen to you during the day, can be potentially dangerous, especially if you poorly take care of personal hygiene, and again especially, if you don’t wash your hand as you should! I am trying to say, that viruses, bacteria and parasites are surrounds, or better say, leave with us in our everyday life. This implies that we are partially responsible if we get stomach flu. Touching contaminated things which don’t necessarily have to be organic and eating food without washing hands, can bring us unwelcome disease. Touching contaminated surfaces or objects, and after that touching food that you plan to eat later, will make that food become contaminated, so even if you wash your hands before your meal, but didn’t wash the food, you can get infection. My advice to you is to approach a little more serious to hand washing, and do it properly, with soap and not just water!!!
The second dangerous situation is more related to your relationship with already infected people. You have to take this very seriously since the infection can jump from infected person to you in a bizarre situations such are greeting by hands shake or kissing. Hands shaking is related to your washing hands, but if you forget to wash them and put your hands/fingers in your mouth, you’re done, in a few days, if not tomorrow, you suffer from stomach flu symptoms. Kissing is more direct since your doors and their doors are ready to exchange the infection. If you know that someone is infected, don’t do this, never, if you don’t know, be careful!
Next dangerous situation may be, if someone very close to you is infected, and you have habit to share food, eat from same utensils, or drink from the same glass. These way you directly opened yourself to infection, and in a few days or even less, you can expect stomach flu symptoms to appear. “Sharing some meals is something I wish the world could do”, but it can seriously damage your health. In one situation, you can know that someone is infected, and you do that consciously, but in another, there are possibilities that your close person is not yet sick, but infected, and by that, you without knowing get sick. There is an paradox in this situation and it is, if your close person is not sick, but infected, and you get infection from him or her, you get sick before them, and later on when he or she get sick as well, you are in charge for spreading the illness :)
This guy probably doesn’t know what is stomach flu!
Some more situations are more related to external factors then they are up to you. Let’s say you are having a nice dinner in your favorite restaurant, and you order your favorite meal. You eat it, and you get stomach flu. Similar to previous case, here are two options (do not read if you have week stomach) :
1. food is contaminated itself – it is not properly washed, meat is to old…
2. someone from personnel is contaminated or infected – not experiencing symptoms, do something stupid, like liking fingers and than touching your food; or experiencing symptoms like vomiting or diarrhea and without washing hands, touching your food…
As you can see there is huge amount of possible situations of getting this thing, so huge that I could write them for days… Some of them depends on you and some of them do not.
Do the things that depends on you with love to your self! Don’t blame if someone else brought it upon you! Stomach flu symptoms are, more or less passing in a few days, but you’ll learn a valuable lesson from it!
And for the and, there is a little catch with all this situations, you are not able to know if someone is infected or not, since the period of incubation depends from person to person, or better say form immune system to immune system.