Tips to prevent diarrhea in summer
Eating cooked food and drinking boiled water, ensuring hygiene, and having knowledge about diarrhea and how to treat it will help you effectively prevent this disease.
Although it is a common disease that can be treated at home, diarrhea is still listed in the World Health Organization's list of 10 dangerous diseases every year. According to WHO statistics, each year, about 3 to 5 million people in the world suffer from diarrhea, of which 100,000 to 120,000 die.
According to experts, this is a paradox, stemming from people's subjectivity in prevention and treatment.
Diarrhea occurs rapidly in the summer.
In Vietnam, diarrhea occurs year-round, but is concentrated in the summer, mainly due to eating spoiled food contaminated with pathogens. According to WHO, on average, about 2 million people suffer from diarrhea due to food poisoning each year. The cost of treating these patients is up to 2,000 billion VND per year.
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Eating spoiled food is the leading cause of diarrhea. |
Children under 5 years old are heavily affected by diarrhea. In the summer, children's hospitals in Vietnam often receive a high number of children with diarrhea.
How to prevent diarrhea
To prevent diarrhea attacks in the summer, WHO recommends that housewives should pocket food preservation tips.
First of all, you need to choose clean, fresh ingredients with clear origins, and use clean water when processing and cooking. Maintaining hygiene in all stages from processing to cooking and preservation also helps limit the growth of pathogens.
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Make sure food has a clear origin to prevent diarrhea. |
Food should be thoroughly cooked, especially meat, poultry, and seafood. Leftovers should be reheated before consumption.
Housewives also need to separate cooked and raw foods when storing to avoid cross-contamination from raw meat to cooked food causing diarrhea.For cooked food, before storing, you should cook it at a temperature above 60 degrees Celsius. Fresh food needs to be stored at minus 5 degrees Celsius to prevent bacteria from growing.
Notes when caring for people with diarrhea
Besides prevention, each person also needs to equip themselves with knowledge, care and treatment when sick.
When having diarrhea, the body is very susceptible to dehydration, if not rehydrated, it will lead to electrolyte disturbances, causing dangerous complications. Therefore, providing enough water is very necessary. In addition, nutrition for people with diarrhea is also quite important, avoid excessive abstinence which will exhaust the body, making the disease take longer to heal.
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When having diarrhea, the body needs to drink more water than usual, especially for children. |
Diarrhea patients still need to eat enough nutrients and energy: protein, minerals, vitamins... from meat, fish, eggs, beans with small meals.Food for sick people needs to be cooked thoroughly, softer, thinner than usual and eaten immediately to ensure hygiene and reduce the risk of secondary infection.In addition, patients can supplement with ripe fruits or ripe fruit juices such as bananas, oranges, lemons, mangoes, papayas, etc. to increase the amount of potassium needed by the body.
Diarrhea can be treated at home, but you should not use antibiotics indiscriminately because they only kill bacteria, while diarrhea can be caused by rotavirus. In addition, antibiotics not only kill harmful bacteria but also beneficial bacteria, so it can easily unbalance the intestinal ecosystem, leading to prolonged diarrhea.
In addition, people with diarrhea should not arbitrarily use drugs and methods to quickly stop diarrhea because in some cases, the stool that is not expelled will remain in the intestine, easily leading to obstruction, enteritis, intestinal ulcers... making the disease worse.
