If this helps to reduce the incidence of food poisoning, I'm all for it. A friend working in my office was there last winter, and their 1,5yo son returned with a chronic clostridia infection. Multiple rounds of antibiotics were needed for him to stop losing weight, and the damage done to his microbiome will likely be permanent. His parents had the usual food poisoning symptoms and were done with it within a few days.
It won't, rule 1 for travelling in that part of the world is to walk past the nice looking but empty restaurants and head straight to the street stall where the locals are eating. The food in the street stall hasn't had time to go off because it was probably brought fresh that day, the food in the back of the restaurant might have been sitting there for far too long waiting for a customer to order it.
My wife and I spent 9 weeks in SE Asia. The only time I got sick was trying Indian food in an empty restaraunt in Chiang Mai. Since then the rules have been "no empty restaurants" and "try to eat where the locals are eating".
+1. Spent a year and a half in Thailand working in local offices well off the tourist path and devouring everything in sight. Only got sick once... at an overpriced but nicely decorated tourist trap in Ko Samui.
> If this helps to reduce the incidence of food poisoning, I'm all for it.
I can think of no reason it would? Why?
Street vendors obviously use food from the markets quickly and should learn from their mistakes on a smaller percent of people.
Forcing people to eat at home means they'll have food bought from the same markets sitting around for longer, less equipment and without any experience on unusual occurrences.
And I'm not sure why educated adults should be denied the amazing experience of street food in any case.
Plus I'd be guessing the child got that from a restaurant, assuming they are tourists this is where most get sick from in my experience (generally I find the less adventurous are the ones who tend to get sick)
Just arrived from a one year trip in SE Asia with my girlfriend and we never got sick :/
Its normal that a 1.5yo gets sick there... like in any other place of the world if you still dont have your immune system working...
If you get a kid living in a sterile place where the immune system cannot learn about "the bad things" and you take it to a more alive place is normal that the kid gets sick!
Well the whole family had classical food poisoning, so in that case it's got nothing to do with the son's immune system. Yes perhaps his microbiome was not stable.
Fresh washed fruit and vegetables from groceries? Sit down restaurants in malls? Any sit down restaurant. The hotel diner? Even McDonalds.
Small children have different diets than adults and are known to be sensitive. It's like your complaining about how non-smooth the sidewalks there are for strollers, how the R-rated movie they went to psychologically scarred their child, how their child had a really bad time with the typical spice level of thai food. It was negligent of them to feed their kid street food, but it isn't a reason to ban it.
spent almost half year in Thailand, had food poisoning once when I ate something which didn't look froms tall which looked odd already at that time, every other time I had at worst average experience, but mostly just enjoying tasty food
it should be mentioned that I use a lot of spicy and provided chillies, which may make difference with burning bacteria
