4 ms·
Vomiting and diarrhoea can, and will, kill you. I have personally had a particularly bad bout of food poisoning (unrelated to potatoes) where I was dehydrating
by pdpi 5y ago
Vomiting and diarrhoea can, and will, kill you. I have personally had a particularly bad bout of food poisoning (unrelated to potatoes) where I was dehydrating to the point it was affecting kidney and liver function, and I needed a few litres of fluids IV.
IF you're in a wealthy country and have alternatives, potatoes are cheap enough they're not worth the risk, however small. If you are in such a bad situation that you're at risk of starvation, green/sprouted potatoes might be worth the risk, but you're also taking a genuinely dangerous gamble.
- recursive 5y agoI've had vomiting and diahrea and they didn't kill me. So that's a counter example. I also eat sprouted potatoes occasionally and have never experienced so much as a negative thought.
- pdpi 5y agoFair enough. Let's remove personal anecdotes from the equation then, and look at the big picture. According to the WHO, diarrhoeal diseases are, world-wide, the second biggest cause of death for children under the age of 5, after only respiratory infections. That's approximately 3 deaths per 1000 births. For Somalia specifically, it's over 13 per mille, for Nigeria it's around 10. By comparison, that number is instead around 0.01 deaths per mille in western Europe and the US. To really put it into perspective, in aggregate across all causes of death, the US has an infant mortality rate of 6.5 per mille. Let that sit with you for a moment: Take all the small children that die in the US in any given year. Now double that number. Now imagine they all died to to a diarrhoeal disease. That is how much diarrhoea can kill.