Food-Bourne Illnesses

Using the following scenario, complete the case study.

During Spring Break, Angela, Bridgette, and Laura went to a small Mexican town near the Gulf of Mexico. On Friday night, the girls went to a restaurant. Angela and Bridgette shared a pizza with ground beef, refried beans, cheese, and some vegetable toppings. Laura ate a large portion of chicken fajitas. After dinner, Laura brought her leftover chicken fajitas back to the hotel and stored them in the room’s refrigerator. Saturday morning, the girls ate bagels and fresh fruit. For lunch, the girls stopped at a deli. Angela had a spinach salad with fresh strawberries, blueberries, and poppy seed dressing. Bridgette had a shrimp salad sandwich on a toasted multigrain roll. Laura had a bowl of seafood gumbo soup.

The young women were having so much fun that evening, they didn’t have time for a sit-down dinner, so they each ate a hot dog from a street vendor. When they returned to the hotel later that evening, they were a little bit hungry, so they shared Laura’s chicken fajita leftovers after reheating them in a microwave. Between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, Angela and Bridgette each woke up feeling nauseous and bloated. They spent most of Sunday sick with vomiting and diarrhea. Angela also had a very bad headache and chills. Laura felt fine, but she was stuck in the hotel room taking care of her sick friends all day.

Determine what food(s) you think could have potentially been the source of Angela and Bridgette’s food-borne illness.  Explain your reasoning.

Identify potential sources of food-borne illness for each of the meals the girls ate over the weekend.

Based on their symptoms, suspected food source(s), and the time of onset, analyze which microorganism(s) were most likely to have been responsible for their illness. Use references to support your claims.

Discuss any precautions that Bridgette and Angela could have done differently to prevent developing a food-borne illness. Explain your answer.