Botulism

[eye]

Is anyone else absolutely petrified about botulism?

I feel like I'm going to catch it from everything, especially when other people have cooked potatoes and I feel like they haven't prepared them properly. It's genuinely becoming embarrassing and awkward but then I start freaking out after I've eaten food that I think's been contaminated, but there's no nice way to say it to someone because you're basically insulting them in thinking that they don't know how to cook.

For example my flatmates cooked some potatoes in a slow cooker with the skin on and now I'm freaking out that I've contracted it.

Has anyone else suffered from this? Is there any way to get over it? I've recently started seeing someone about anxiety, and while other symptoms have got a bit better this is still something I am freaking out about on a regular basis.

[blackbroom]

I get this one, too. I'm not so bad at the moment (although I've just thrown out a tin of beans because it had a dent in it and I started to worry the can had warped because of the botulism toxin giving off fumes), but I was really, really bad a few years ago - kept googling botulism for hours every day to "reassure" myself and just scared myself even more by finding out more about it.

Leaving the skin on potatoes is not a botulism risk - the skin is permeable, so oxygen can penetrate the potato, and botulism toxin cannot form in the presence of oxygen.

Botulism is very, very rare in every country, but it's particularly rare in the UK and Ireland and almost all cases these days are foreigners who have brought home preserved foods in from abroad. You have a greater chance of winning the lottery or representing your nation at the Eurovision Song Contest than you do of getting botulism.

But I know only too well that, however much you know that rationally, it doesn't stop the terror. I got better by being strict with myself and not letting myself Google botulism any more and finding mental distractions. I also find that writing down what I'm worrying about and leaving it to a "worry hour" later in the day, when I give myself permission to worry about the things on my worry list for 1 hour only, really helps.

ETA I started wondering why it's potatoes in particular that you are worried about. I'm guessing that you have read about the case in the US where someone got botulism poisoning from a baked potato in a restaurant. But that wasn't because potatoes are particularly dangerous (they're no more botulism-prone than any other alkaline or low-acid foods, including most of the other things that get put in slow cookers, and no-one to my knowledge has ever got botulism form eating food from a slow cooker!) - it's because they were left wrapped in silver foil overnight (which blocks out oxygen) in a warm oven and then reheated. It was the silver foil and the lukewarm temperature that was the problem. Even then, a lot of bad luck was involved. There really does need to be a perfect storm for botulism poisoning to occur.

All the botulism cases in the UK since records begun have been from food stored at room temperature for weeks or months (in most cases, home preserved foods, as factory-produced food that is designed to be stored at room temperature is treated to destroy botulism spores), not food that has been dodgily cooked. I researched botulism fairly thoroughly when my HA was at its peak and I never came across a case in any country that was caused by bad home cooking.

[eye]

Thanks for your reply, weird as it sounds it's really helpful to know that someone else out there gets a similar fear of botulism, or at least someone who gets what I'm going through. Definitely get the canned food fear, recently made my boyfriend disinfect a saucepan that he'd put some out-of-date canned peas into and then basically refused to eat anything from that saucepan for the next week... You're completely right though, the chances are really, really tiny, just seeing them written out was really helpful.

I'm definitely going to try start doing the worry hour thing, since my HA has really peaked recently for some reason (probably not been helped since I found out what botulism was!)

[WorryRaptor]

Yes. I have this almost constantly. I've even given my partner a list of symptoms to look out for, and things to tell the doctors should I find myself struck down and paralysed and unable to talk. He looks at me like I've gone mad! Today I'm convinced I've caught it from water I boiled veggies with, that I accidentally left in the pot overnight.
Of course I washed the pot the next day and re-used it to make noodles, but now I have a dry throat and mouth which I heard is a symptom. It's been about 12-14 hours since I ate the noodles. I also let hunger get the better of me and ate some cold cooked chicken straight from the fridge (am convinced while it was cooling on the side that it managed to grow a host of deadly toxins which I have consumed)
Now, my anxious brain is telling me that my dry throat couldn't possibly be from the flu I had over the last two weeks, or that I've not been drinking enough water but instead, it MUST be something extremely rare and terrible. I'm terrified to wash up in the kitchen or using any utensils as I'm convinced I've splashed spores everywhere. I know I sound unreasonable, yet I can't seem to stop!