WASHINGTON - It's a dirty little secret of food poisoning: E. coli and certain other foodborne illnesses can sometimes trigger serious health problems months or years after patients survived that initial bout.
Scientists only now are unravelling a legacy that has largely gone unnoticed.
What they've spotted so far is troubling. In interviews with The Associated Press, they described high blood pressure, kidney damage, even full kidney failure striking 10 to 20 years later in people who survived severe E. coli infection as children, arthritis after a bout of salmonella or shigella, and a mysterious paralysis that can attack people who just had mild symptoms of campylobacter.
"Folks often assume once you're over the acute illness, that's it, you're back to normal and that's the end of it," said Dr. Robert Tauxe of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The long-term consequences are "an important but relatively poorly documented, poorly studied area of foodborne illness."
These late effects are believed to make up a very small fraction of the 76 million annual food poisonings in the United States, although no one knows just how many people are at risk. A bigger question is what other illnesses have yet to be scientifically linked to food poisoning.
And with a rash of food recalls - including more than 13 million kilograms of ground beef pulled off the market last year alone - these are questions are taking on new urgency.
"We're drastically underestimating the burden on society that foodborne illnesses represent," contends Donna Rosenbaum of the consumer advocacy group STOP, Safe Tables Our Priority.
Every week, her group hears from patients with health complaints that they suspect or have been told are related to food poisoning years earlier, like a woman who survived severe E. coli at eight only to have her colon removed in her 20s. Or people who develop diabetes after food poisoning inflamed the pancreas. Or parents who wonder if a child's learning problems stem from food poisoning-caused dialysis as a toddler.
"There's nobody to refer them to for an answer," says Rosenbaum.
So STOP this month is beginning the first national registry of food-poisoning survivors with long-term health problems - people willing to share their medical histories with scientists in hopes of boosting much-needed research.
Consider Alyssa Chrobuck of Seattle, who at age five was hospitalized as part of the Jack-in-the-Box hamburger outbreak that 15 years ago this month made a deadly E. coli strain notorious.
She's now a successful college student but ticks off a list of health problems unusual for a 20-year-old: High blood pressure, recurring hospitalizations for colon inflammation, a hiatal hernia, thyroid removal, endometriosis.
"I can't eat fatty foods. I can't eat things that are fried, never been able to eat ice cream or milkshakes," says Chrobuck. "Would I have this many medical problems if I hadn't had the E. coli? Definitely not. But there's no way to tie it definitely back."
The CDC says foodborne illnesses cause 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths a year. Among survivors, some long-term consequences are obvious from the outset. Some required kidney transplants. They may have scarred intestines that promise lasting digestive difficulty.
