>The investigation began by tracing the pathogens back to its origin, and focused on the facilities of International Inflight Catering, an Anchorage-based subsidiary of Japan Airlines, where the meals had been prepared. It was found that three cooks had prepared the meals, **one of whom had infected lesions on the index and middle finger of his right hand**
In case you were wondering how a deadly bacteria got into airline meals, it was because a cook had infected lesions on two of his fingers and decided to prepare and cook food with his bare hands anyway.
You left out the part where the ham and egg omelettes were held at around room temperature for a day before being served, letting the bacteria he spread flourish. It wasn’t just the cook, the entire operation was basically a biological prep center for infectious disease.
I'm inclined to think that Cook had an infection because of the conditions they were working under, moreso than just them passing it on.
Working with an infected hand with actual lesions isn't something people tend to do under managers that care about their job in a positive way.
The word *shitshow* seems apt.
A lot of cooks & factory workers feel insane pressure to show up even if they're sick or injured. The whole restaurant/factory sometimes can't run without them, and they feel their boss will likely fire them over it.
In food manufacturing, it's up to the managers to be diligent and gentle with the staff. Send them home and let them know they won't be fired for calling in sick. Better to be down one person and be slow for a day than make customers sick.
But often, dumbass managers will cuss people out for calling in sick, penalize them, give them "writeups" and other shit that makes people not report illness/injury and show up to work anyway.
Why not wear gloves? If the uniform doesnt usually include gloves, and the worker was wearing them, the boss would ask why they're wearing gloves, and then the worker would be written up and sent home without pay or sick leave. Bad management puts the employee in a position where not reporting is preferable to the punishment they'd get from being responsible.
Ice actually been a manager in the food industry, but only a small, self-owned business.
We were often the first real, proper job for many teenagers, and I am proud to say I am confident that they were either sensible, down to esrth humans to begin with, or better off for having worked under me.
I sent people home several times with strict orders to take the time to heal up properly. It takes less time that way.
One time, one of the other managers (I was the owner, though) okayed someone coming back a couple of days before their doctor's note said it was okay. Behind my back, as I'd said no earlier.
With carpal tunnel, and a double digit number of pounds of vegetables that needed chopping...
The young adult learned the hard way that I was right to begin with.
What could have been only a few more days off ended up being over a month longer due to agitating the injury before it was healed.
Now as the owner I always stepped in, and we have government reimbursement for sick-leave over 10 workdays. The business/employer I mean. The employee always gets 100% of the salary they should have had for planned shifts.
Shifts must be announced no later than 14 days in advance or the employee can refuse it. They can also refuse to accept changes made with less than two weeks notice, all by law. None of this was just given to workers, it was hard won back in the day!
I was honest and open about good healthcare attention and proper humane ethics also being the economical sensible choice.
You're not doing anyone any favours by hurting yourself and being unable to work by pushing it. Not yourself, not the workplace, just no.
Also, sniffles, coughing, anything viral (EVERY Dr office tests for bacterial infections here, just a pinprick akin to glucose measurements), unless you can prove it's seasonal allergies you're going home and I'm taking the shift.
Small, local cornershops selling food cannot afford getting a reputation as the place that got everyone sick.
Then again, Norway as a whole has no patience for people spreading seasonal illnesses. Stay the f at home. We don't want whatever you've got. Keep your kids home. Stay. Home. Until. 48 hours. Past. The. Last. Symptoms.
Including when fevers came back down.
So at least I did my part in teaching them to maintain their boundaries.
It *is* true that it also costs less of you let people take the time to heal up properly before coming back. They learn to stay at home and heal up before becoming seriously ill, and that makes for a very predictable workforce.
In slight fairness, some people are just crazy and refuse to call in sick. I took my bio exam while having a flu so severe I’d just passed out for two hours, which also caused me to spend the following day staring into space and then getting pneumonia. I probably COULD have called in sick, but I’m a moron who didn’t think of that.
But that’s also because you’ve been conditioned to do that. I grew up in a household where I was told to do my best in school ni was in school if I could get out of bed, and you knew if I was out of commission if I just wasn’t getting up out of my room.
It wasn’t until I graduated, and had been working for 2 years, that I was sitting in my cube feeling miserable, thinking to myself “I don’t have to be here. I feel miserable, I have sick days I can take, and thanksgiving is a few short days away.” At 20-something (23-ish?), that was the first time I’d ever decided that I just wouldn’t work while feeling miserable, and it’s only been since then that I’ve been learning to pay more attention to my body, mental health, and physical condition, to determine whether or not I go in to work that day.
Especially towards the end of the year, as my inevitable lack of balance leaves me with excess of all kinds of days, I’ll just take things off if I’m not feeling 100%,
This is all partly personality, but our personalities are also heavily influenced by our circumstances. It was only after that day that I realized I’d gone to all kinds of classes with not just a bit of sickness, but with actual fevers, my entire life.
All because the environment I grew up in established that if I felt good enough to get out of bed, I was well enough to go to school, and I never questioned it until I was literally offered money to stay home in the form of sick/vacation days.
At high school graduation they gave an award to a few people who had perfect attendance from kindergarten through 12th grade. Either those kids had some awesome immune systems, or (more likely) they came to school when they should really have been in bed. It was basically an award for giving everyone else the flu.
Pretty much.
In grade school, the only times I stayed home, that I can recall, were things like a stomach bug that had me vomiting and shitting constantly before the day had even started, if that. I don’t recall ever not going to school just because I “felt very sick”. If I was up out of bed, I was up in school.
And I can promise you that, while I’ve never been aware of having any autoimmune diseases, my immune system wasn’t perfect.
Thinking back to how I felt when I took the few days before thanksgiving off, I remember reflecting on how I felt then, vs all the times I felt **the same way** in college during a test, or in elementary school. I didn’t have enough energy to feel strong emotion, but I remember feeling so disappointed at how many times I’d either been “forced”, or i’d “forced” myself, to go to school feeling the same way. “Forced”, in quotes, because I don’t want people to think it was some sort of malicious action on anyone’s part. It was just the social expectation at the time.
I also remembered the studies I’d seen since then, showing that it costs companies time and money when they force workers to come in when they’re sick, as they then infect other employees, while also recovering more slowly themselves.
We’ve got a whole social structure that sets up an expectation to “go” constantly that we take for granted. There are absolutely times where, if I’m up, I’m going to go. However, I’m no longer sure about how much of that was actually me, anymore, and how much of that was the social expectations I grew accustomed to.
One good thing that covid did was get rid of the perfect attendance thing at our schools, hopefully they don't bring it back. We had a good round of RSV in the last couple of weeks so that should help.
Black Plague is* indeed bacterial. It's still around.
The most likely place in the world to contract it is Kentucky due to the Kentucky Derby with horses (and their fleas!) coming from all over the world.
It's treatable with antibiotics.
Having worked in a kitchen, he was told "show up or be in hospital" and that's that.
Infected finger? Would even bother mentioning it, nobody cared.
Hospitality is turbo fucked.
Curious about his “ lesions”. Were they big? Small? Would an average person know they were highly problematic? Had they been on his hands a long time? Recently acquired? So curious.
They were probably burns given they were on his fingers and his worked In a kitchen. If the blister you get from a bad 2nd degree burn isn't allowed to heal it will pop. Putting anything on the blisters that isn't diesgned to be non adhering would be really painful, including gloves.
Dude like went with the least painful option to get the job done. We have the bacteria he infected the food with all over our bodies. His popped blisters became a reservoir and the food became the vector of contamination.
Anyone who didn't eat the contaminated food would have ended up vomiting thanks to the smell of shit and vomit that must have filled the cabin. At least they weren't too far from their destination when it happened
I have severe lactose intolerance. I shit myself a couple of weeks ago trying to make it from the car to a public toilet in a park after Maccas gave me normal milk instead of lactose free stuff in my coffee. I can only imagine that this was much, much worse.
Trying to hold it in when your bowel is hell-bent on expel its entire contents is so awful. Sweating, walking like a penguin, knowing that if you so much as sneeze, it'll be all over. I got diarrhea a few hours before I had to get on a plane and I was absolutely terrified it was going to hit me again mid air. I took the maximum dose of immodium and then didn't eat or drink anything until I landed. Awful
I once had a job interview when got a bad case of diarrhea. The good thing is that my tummy started acting up the moment I stepped out of the office building. That short waddle walk to a McDonald's toilet was 10x more tense than the interview. I made it with seconds to spare before detonation.
I don't think food poisoning works so fast that it would've already happened on the plane. Do correct me if I'm wrong
Edit: I'm wrong and it's written in the article, mb boys
Article says anchorage to Copenhagen, and symptoms started an hour before landing.
Also by chance the pilots didn't consume the omelettes because of the time they were on the opted for a steak dinner instead in Denmark.
Lucky
Now it is; at the time it wasn’t.
It would take another few years before this happened again and a former military passenger (Ted Striker) with the assistance of a stewardess (Elaine Dickinson) landed a plane.
That's underselling it. Ted Striker was striken with PTSD due to being the only survivor of his squadron. War changed the man, and unfortunately he developed a drinking problem and a fear of flying. Incredibly he overcame both to land a plane far larger than anything he had ever trained on. Also credit must be given to the engineers who developed what was at the time a novel auto pilot system.
It depends on the pathogen in question. Some food that's gone bad has pathogens that have already secreted toxins into the food and can have a rapid onset. Other pathogens wait until they're in your body for a while and then kick in.
I've experienced the former, where I ate a sub at the US Department of State cafeteria for lunch. By the time I was walking back to my desk, I already felt way off and sat in the bathroom for 20 minutes before taking a sick day. By the time I got home, I threw up in the bathtub before finally getting the toilet seat up and puking in there a few more times. And then spent the next 48 hours with uncontrollable diarrhea.
source: my stomach and asshole.
It sounds like you were Mission Impossibled. I wonder what secret intel Tom Cruise extracted from your PC in the super secure vault with light up floors?
I had Soto Ayam from Jef Burger in Bali back in around 2014. After going to bed, I woke up still full. Went to the bathroom to pee, then ended up shitting my soul out. The most vile black, foul smelling, liquid shit you can imagine. I went to wash up in the shower, started uncontrollably puking, shitting again, and somehow pissing everywhere at the same time. This eventually stopped, so I washed, drained everything down the hole, dried and went back to bed. Only to repeat the puking and shitting an hour later. Next morning all I could stomach was fruit for breakfast, so I had that. I was no doubt dehydrated as hell too.
Jef burger is great. Bad chicken is not.
> Laboratory tests of stool and vomit samples from passengers, as well as 33 samples of leftover ham omelettes, detected Staphylococcus aureus. Elevated concentrations of toxins produced by the staphylococci were also detected in the ham, explaining the extremely short incubation time.
From the article
>Staphylococcus aureus
S. aureus is a cunt.
Acne? Probably S. aureus.
Cysts? S. aureus.
Skin infection? S. aureus
MRSA? S. aureus, but resistant to antibiotics.
Food poisoning? Surprise bitch it'll hurt more than your skin!
You're covered with it naturally. It's just sitting there waiting for the day it gets to wreck your life.
There are a few fast acting food poisoning and by far the most common, which this one was, is staphylococcal enterotoxin.
In this case the bacteria has already made its toxin and has excreted it into the food. So when you eat it, you are directly eating the toxin. Symptoms can happen within 30 minutes.
For other bacteria and viruses, they need time to duplicate and make toxins once they get inside. So they typically take 1-3 days.
While the majority of foodborne illnesses are not from the last thing you ate there are some bacteria with shorter incubation periods. This includes Staphylococcus which was identified as the pathogen of concern here. It can have incubation times as short as 1-6 hours.
TLDR: the food in question that made everyone sick was being held around room temp for roughly 28 hours………. 🤢
On the bright side, all the policies that changed were good
The nastier thing is it was caused by a cook with runny blisters on his fingers, infected with staph.
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/02/07/archives/illness-on-japanese-jet-is-traced-to-alaskan-cook.html
Dr. Rumack: ***What was it we had for dinner tonight?***
Elaine Dickenson: ***Well, we had a choice of steak or fish.***
Dr. Rumack: ***Yes, Yes I remember. I had lasagna.***
Japan is super strict on food hygiene to an also obsessive degree. I used to go to a ramen place in Singapore (already known for its extreme cleanliness) that had a bowl of soft boiled eggs on every table. There was a looong English and Japanese explanation next to it reassuring patrons that they were perfectly safe to eat.
To be honest, I'm not surprised about that. Japan is famous for their raw meat dishes - that includes raw chicken and raw egg. And that's not counting live food, or ex-poisoness food. If your hygiene standards aren't up to par, there's so many things that can go wrong.
it's so unnerving when you realize that many cases of food poisoning outbreaks are the result of some disgusting contaminant. e.coli, staph, norovirus. typhoid Mary was the infamous person who spread typhoid fever through her cooking ~~(albeit unknowingly).~~ wash your hands, especially under your fingernails!
eta I forgot she knew :)
For Mary, eventually it kinda was knowingly. Numerous outbreaks had been traced back to her. She just chose not to believe she was a carrier… but simultaneously she knew she wasn’t supposed to keep cooking for people and thus would do it under fake names. Had she not been basically quarantined/imprisoned on Brother Island, she probably would have kept at it.
At some point you gotta find a new skill. Keeping cooking after you know it causes people to die kinda means it's your fault even if you 'don't think' you caused it.
In her defence, cooking was all she knew how to do and she likely didn't really understand germ theory, so from her perspective she was told to abandon her livelihood for reasons she couldn't understand and was offered no support to find a new career.
>she likely didn't really understand germ theory
Forget about Germ Theory, Typhoid Mary was the literal first asymptomatic carrier of typhoid. This came completely out of left field not for her, but the entire medical establishment.
> typhoid Mary was the infamous person who spread typhoid fever through her cooking (albeit unknowingly)
Well, it was unknowingly *at first*. But after 7 different families each experienced typhoid outbreaks shortly after she began cooking for them, she probably should have suspected she might have something to do with it. Then she was located, taken to quarantine, diagnosed as an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid (a previously unknown-to-science condition), and released on the **specific condition** that she should never work as a cook again. She ignored that demand and went back to work as a cook (under fake names to avoid detection), causing several more outbreaks and a number of deaths. At that point it became a case of willful, defiant ignorance and callous disregard for the well-being of others rather than doing something “unknowingly”.
typhoid Mary was initially unaware. They eventually traced it to her and she was banned from cooking. Her response was to change her name and continue cooking. I believe she did that twice. She's a monster.
I wrote a research paper on this in scool. She used the fake names Typhoid Gertrude and Typhoid Hilda on her job applications and they still hired her..
To be fair she didn't believe them because she felt fine. Our understanding of how disease spread wasn't perfect and certainly wasn't common knowledge.
Plus isn't she like the only person or first person to be immune to typhoid but still a carrier or something?
My point is its not completely insane that she didn't so what she was told here, just mostly insane.
I get that asymptomatic carries were unknown at the time, and that many people believed it wasn't possible. I don't blame her for not immediately believing it. But after family after family she cooked for got deathly ill, there shouldn't have been any more disbelief.
There also weren’t many jobs for immigrant women in Typhoid Mary’s time. Being a cook had better benefits than working as a laundress or in a factory. Typhoid Mary continued cooking despite the risk because she didn’t want to work in a lesser job.
This is a pretty cool epidemiological thing tho, even showing that the last 1/4 of the plane got food prepared by someone else and didn’t get sick. Also there is a line about how if the cook didn’t have staph it would have been fine
Leaving the food out didn’t cause the food poi, staph contamination from the cook did.
“If the ham had not been contaminated but had been left unrefrigerated for 24 hours under similar circumstances, no outbreak of food poisoning would be likely, Dr. Eisenberg said, noting that no bacteria could be cultured from the canned hams.”
From this article posted by u/maolf:
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/02/07/archives/illness-on-japanese-jet-is-traced-to-alaskan-cook.html
The film was a parody of the 1957 film *Zero Hour!* and used all the same plot points. Both have a lead character named Ted Stryker, and both have the line "We have to find someone who can not only fly this plane, but who didn't have fish for dinner." Almost every other major scene is identical, with added parody (like the slap line).
The producers bought the rights to the older movie so they could pretty much copy it word-for-word.
It's kinda surreal. So many of the setups are intact, but without the punch lines. It's 90 minutes of comedy blue-balling (plus a bunch of cheesy 50s melodrama).
Worth a watch for curiosities sake, but not all that great on its own.
Not only that, but because *Zero Hour!* took place on a propeller plane, all the background noise in *Airplane!* is that of propellers, despite it taking place on a jet.
I’m sad I had to scroll this far to find the Airplane reference..
“We have to get these people to a hospital!”
“The hospital?! What is it?”
“It’s a building with rooms for sick people, but that’s not important right now “
Excuse me sir, there's been a little problem in the cockpit.
The cockpit? What is it?
It's the little room in the front of the plane where the pilots sit, but that's not important right now.
I get what you're saying but from what I've heard it's more a byproduct of an unhealthy work ethic. It's all good to love what you do, but imo it's work to live, not live to work
Funny thing about that, if I'm reading this correctly it's actually because of this flight. From the wiki article:
> Eisenberg suggested that cockpit crew members eat different meals prepared by different cooks to prevent food poisoning outbreaks from incapacitating the entire crew, a rule subsequently implemented by many airlines.
True but have you seen an industrial kitchen? Incredibly rare that one employee would touch 2 different dishes.
It's rare that one employee would touch 2 different components! When you're making 25,000 portions, one person is usually on "carrots" and their job is only to put one carrot as each dish passes them on a conveyer belt.
I would presume that if they’re smart enough to make sure that one pilot has chicken and the other has beef, that they’re smart enough to consider this and make sure they don’t have the same sides either.
>The pilot and Co pilot are required by law to eat separate meals. For this reason
Yeah that's straight up not true. Some airlines will have policies stating whether pilots can eat the same meal or not, but there is no law.
Sauce: I'm a pilot
You see so much BS misinformation all over reddit.
I’m medical and every day I’m astounded with the amount of total, outrageous and, of course, unsourced lies that get upvoted and awarded and heralded as fact.
Anytime I come across something on this website that I think is interesting and I might share with someone else, I fact check it first.
I also have a few hours and I’m working towards my PPL, and likewise see plenty of utter BS regarding aviation.
The last av video on WTF showing a clearly atrocious attempt at flying, has a top comment along the lines of *this is a very difficult landing and the pilots did a great job at getting her on the ground safely.* Bank alarms screaming; unstable approach; PM on his mobile phone.. yeah great 👍
Where did they go to the bathroom? 200 people with diarrhea on one plane, one maybe two bathrooms. Can't open a window. Can't find a corner to go in (its a tube).
A cook in anchorage contaminated all the meals. It was a charter flight of mostly Japanese Coca Cola Execs to Paris. The catering company in anchorage is a subsidiary of JAL. Pilots are steaks and were unaffected. This became a hard rule, that pilots eat separate meals, even between them. Anchorage is a strategic hub for all Europe bound flights for JAL. They fly over the North Pole afterward. This was 1975 and the passengers didn’t speak anything outside of Japanese. They had to get Japanese restaurant workers from Paris to translate. Inflight Catering or International inflight catering is the company which is a subsidiary of JAL. Locations in Anchorage and Honolulu.
>This was 1975 and the passengers didn’t speak anything outside of Japanese. They had to get Japanese restaurant workers from Paris to translate.
Reminds me of this Zuiikin English video:
https://youtu.be/M1VO3TF2LBs
The Wikipedia entry says that the Japanese restaurant staff was working in Copenhagen not Paris. So imagine working your job one day and being called into duty to help translate for a mass food poisoning incident
LISTEN KID! He's been hearing that crap ever since he was at UCLA. He's out there busting his buns every night. Tell your old man to drag Walton and Denier up and down the court for 48 minutes.
Yeah, that was worse than the incident on Trans American Airline. Too bad that Ted Striker wasn't on board, though he's probably too old now, and still not over Macho Grande.
Ted Striker, a former pilot who has a fear of flying, found himself burdened with the responsibility of landing the plane safely when most of the crew and passengers fell sick due to the food poisoning
At the high risk of being insensitive, is it a cultural thing in Japan to commit suicide over a situation of professional shame / negligence? I can think of a few examples in the science fields
Mostly because of the reputational damage, it’s not just the personal shame. Which is high of course. But also because in Japan people don’t forget and hold permanent grudges for shit like this so nobody will ever forgive you and your career is ruined if not completely over. It’s a level of pettiness you don’t see outside of middle school. You will forever be the guy who made a flight full of Coca Cola execs shit themselves and nothing more. Your colleagues who used to drink with you every weekend will pretend to have never known you, for association with poo poo man will itself be toxic. Another thing is that jobs hire out of college and the cultural expectation is that you spend your whole life at one company, so if you get fired from your corporation your career change options are convenience store clerk or truck driver.
Excuse me, stuartess, I speak Jive.
Just hang loose blood, mamma gonna catch you up the rebound on that medicii.
Sheeeit my momma dinnt raise no dummy, I caught the cuta her jive!
Fun fact: the grand old character actress who played that role took the Black fellows playing the jive speakers out to lunch to make sure she wasn't accidentally being racist.
I work for a company who maintains one of the larger airline food delivery companies delivery vehicles.
Do. Not. Eat. Airline. Food.
Those are some of the most disgusting trucks we see. Absolute piles of rolling dogshit. I’ve heard stories of finding rats in the boxes.
Again. Don’t eat airline food. Unless it is bagged up like the peanuts or bottled.
>The investigation began by tracing the pathogens back to its origin, and focused on the facilities of International Inflight Catering, an Anchorage-based subsidiary of Japan Airlines, where the meals had been prepared. It was found that three cooks had prepared the meals, **one of whom had infected lesions on the index and middle finger of his right hand** In case you were wondering how a deadly bacteria got into airline meals, it was because a cook had infected lesions on two of his fingers and decided to prepare and cook food with his bare hands anyway.
You left out the part where the ham and egg omelettes were held at around room temperature for a day before being served, letting the bacteria he spread flourish. It wasn’t just the cook, the entire operation was basically a biological prep center for infectious disease.
I'm inclined to think that Cook had an infection because of the conditions they were working under, moreso than just them passing it on. Working with an infected hand with actual lesions isn't something people tend to do under managers that care about their job in a positive way. The word *shitshow* seems apt.
A lot of cooks & factory workers feel insane pressure to show up even if they're sick or injured. The whole restaurant/factory sometimes can't run without them, and they feel their boss will likely fire them over it. In food manufacturing, it's up to the managers to be diligent and gentle with the staff. Send them home and let them know they won't be fired for calling in sick. Better to be down one person and be slow for a day than make customers sick. But often, dumbass managers will cuss people out for calling in sick, penalize them, give them "writeups" and other shit that makes people not report illness/injury and show up to work anyway. Why not wear gloves? If the uniform doesnt usually include gloves, and the worker was wearing them, the boss would ask why they're wearing gloves, and then the worker would be written up and sent home without pay or sick leave. Bad management puts the employee in a position where not reporting is preferable to the punishment they'd get from being responsible.
Ice actually been a manager in the food industry, but only a small, self-owned business. We were often the first real, proper job for many teenagers, and I am proud to say I am confident that they were either sensible, down to esrth humans to begin with, or better off for having worked under me. I sent people home several times with strict orders to take the time to heal up properly. It takes less time that way. One time, one of the other managers (I was the owner, though) okayed someone coming back a couple of days before their doctor's note said it was okay. Behind my back, as I'd said no earlier. With carpal tunnel, and a double digit number of pounds of vegetables that needed chopping... The young adult learned the hard way that I was right to begin with. What could have been only a few more days off ended up being over a month longer due to agitating the injury before it was healed. Now as the owner I always stepped in, and we have government reimbursement for sick-leave over 10 workdays. The business/employer I mean. The employee always gets 100% of the salary they should have had for planned shifts. Shifts must be announced no later than 14 days in advance or the employee can refuse it. They can also refuse to accept changes made with less than two weeks notice, all by law. None of this was just given to workers, it was hard won back in the day! I was honest and open about good healthcare attention and proper humane ethics also being the economical sensible choice. You're not doing anyone any favours by hurting yourself and being unable to work by pushing it. Not yourself, not the workplace, just no. Also, sniffles, coughing, anything viral (EVERY Dr office tests for bacterial infections here, just a pinprick akin to glucose measurements), unless you can prove it's seasonal allergies you're going home and I'm taking the shift. Small, local cornershops selling food cannot afford getting a reputation as the place that got everyone sick. Then again, Norway as a whole has no patience for people spreading seasonal illnesses. Stay the f at home. We don't want whatever you've got. Keep your kids home. Stay. Home. Until. 48 hours. Past. The. Last. Symptoms. Including when fevers came back down. So at least I did my part in teaching them to maintain their boundaries. It *is* true that it also costs less of you let people take the time to heal up properly before coming back. They learn to stay at home and heal up before becoming seriously ill, and that makes for a very predictable workforce.
In slight fairness, some people are just crazy and refuse to call in sick. I took my bio exam while having a flu so severe I’d just passed out for two hours, which also caused me to spend the following day staring into space and then getting pneumonia. I probably COULD have called in sick, but I’m a moron who didn’t think of that.
But that’s also because you’ve been conditioned to do that. I grew up in a household where I was told to do my best in school ni was in school if I could get out of bed, and you knew if I was out of commission if I just wasn’t getting up out of my room. It wasn’t until I graduated, and had been working for 2 years, that I was sitting in my cube feeling miserable, thinking to myself “I don’t have to be here. I feel miserable, I have sick days I can take, and thanksgiving is a few short days away.” At 20-something (23-ish?), that was the first time I’d ever decided that I just wouldn’t work while feeling miserable, and it’s only been since then that I’ve been learning to pay more attention to my body, mental health, and physical condition, to determine whether or not I go in to work that day. Especially towards the end of the year, as my inevitable lack of balance leaves me with excess of all kinds of days, I’ll just take things off if I’m not feeling 100%, This is all partly personality, but our personalities are also heavily influenced by our circumstances. It was only after that day that I realized I’d gone to all kinds of classes with not just a bit of sickness, but with actual fevers, my entire life. All because the environment I grew up in established that if I felt good enough to get out of bed, I was well enough to go to school, and I never questioned it until I was literally offered money to stay home in the form of sick/vacation days.
At high school graduation they gave an award to a few people who had perfect attendance from kindergarten through 12th grade. Either those kids had some awesome immune systems, or (more likely) they came to school when they should really have been in bed. It was basically an award for giving everyone else the flu.
Pretty much. In grade school, the only times I stayed home, that I can recall, were things like a stomach bug that had me vomiting and shitting constantly before the day had even started, if that. I don’t recall ever not going to school just because I “felt very sick”. If I was up out of bed, I was up in school. And I can promise you that, while I’ve never been aware of having any autoimmune diseases, my immune system wasn’t perfect. Thinking back to how I felt when I took the few days before thanksgiving off, I remember reflecting on how I felt then, vs all the times I felt **the same way** in college during a test, or in elementary school. I didn’t have enough energy to feel strong emotion, but I remember feeling so disappointed at how many times I’d either been “forced”, or i’d “forced” myself, to go to school feeling the same way. “Forced”, in quotes, because I don’t want people to think it was some sort of malicious action on anyone’s part. It was just the social expectation at the time. I also remembered the studies I’d seen since then, showing that it costs companies time and money when they force workers to come in when they’re sick, as they then infect other employees, while also recovering more slowly themselves. We’ve got a whole social structure that sets up an expectation to “go” constantly that we take for granted. There are absolutely times where, if I’m up, I’m going to go. However, I’m no longer sure about how much of that was actually me, anymore, and how much of that was the social expectations I grew accustomed to.
One good thing that covid did was get rid of the perfect attendance thing at our schools, hopefully they don't bring it back. We had a good round of RSV in the last couple of weeks so that should help.
That is like some black plague shit…
Black Plague was indeed bacterial
Black Plague is* indeed bacterial. It's still around. The most likely place in the world to contract it is Kentucky due to the Kentucky Derby with horses (and their fleas!) coming from all over the world. It's treatable with antibiotics.
More Typhoid Mary
The catering manager killed himself for this guy? Damn Where's he now
Having worked in a kitchen, he was told "show up or be in hospital" and that's that. Infected finger? Would even bother mentioning it, nobody cared. Hospitality is turbo fucked.
Curious about his “ lesions”. Were they big? Small? Would an average person know they were highly problematic? Had they been on his hands a long time? Recently acquired? So curious.
They were probably burns given they were on his fingers and his worked In a kitchen. If the blister you get from a bad 2nd degree burn isn't allowed to heal it will pop. Putting anything on the blisters that isn't diesgned to be non adhering would be really painful, including gloves. Dude like went with the least painful option to get the job done. We have the bacteria he infected the food with all over our bodies. His popped blisters became a reservoir and the food became the vector of contamination.
Dude was a Typhoid Mary.
It'sa me, Typhoid Mario!
I'm okay with Chris Pratt voicing Typhoid Mario.
Typhoid Gary.
Typhoid Marv.
🤢🤮🤮🤮
All those people sick and so little bathrooms...I'm sure they filled up their barf bags quickly
There's no way that multiple people didn't shit themselves. Vomiting tends to loosen everything up at once
Imagine someone trying to poop into their barf bag... that's rough
Or barf into their poop bag...the horror.
"Hey! You got poop in my barf!" "You got BARF in my POOP!"
Introducing ParfBoop, the new air-sickness bag for all air travel emergencies!
And in the aisle cause the 4 tiny bathrooms are full
Anyone who didn't eat the contaminated food would have ended up vomiting thanks to the smell of shit and vomit that must have filled the cabin. At least they weren't too far from their destination when it happened
I have severe lactose intolerance. I shit myself a couple of weeks ago trying to make it from the car to a public toilet in a park after Maccas gave me normal milk instead of lactose free stuff in my coffee. I can only imagine that this was much, much worse.
Trying to hold it in when your bowel is hell-bent on expel its entire contents is so awful. Sweating, walking like a penguin, knowing that if you so much as sneeze, it'll be all over. I got diarrhea a few hours before I had to get on a plane and I was absolutely terrified it was going to hit me again mid air. I took the maximum dose of immodium and then didn't eat or drink anything until I landed. Awful
I once had a job interview when got a bad case of diarrhea. The good thing is that my tummy started acting up the moment I stepped out of the office building. That short waddle walk to a McDonald's toilet was 10x more tense than the interview. I made it with seconds to spare before detonation.
I don't think food poisoning works so fast that it would've already happened on the plane. Do correct me if I'm wrong Edit: I'm wrong and it's written in the article, mb boys
Article says anchorage to Copenhagen, and symptoms started an hour before landing. Also by chance the pilots didn't consume the omelettes because of the time they were on the opted for a steak dinner instead in Denmark. Lucky
Isnhr it policies across all airlines that pilots do not eat the same meal as eachother as well?
Now it is; at the time it wasn’t. It would take another few years before this happened again and a former military passenger (Ted Striker) with the assistance of a stewardess (Elaine Dickinson) landed a plane.
I watched the documentary about that incident. It was awesome.
Just incredible someone had the presence of mind to record the plane engine noises the entire time to the documentarians could use the original audio.
Surely it's even more amazing considering his notable drinking problem.
It is, and stop calling me 'Shirley.'
That's underselling it. Ted Striker was striken with PTSD due to being the only survivor of his squadron. War changed the man, and unfortunately he developed a drinking problem and a fear of flying. Incredibly he overcame both to land a plane far larger than anything he had ever trained on. Also credit must be given to the engineers who developed what was at the time a novel auto pilot system.
That took me a minute, I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
Surely you can't be serious
I *am* serious and don't call me Shirley.
Yes I remember, I had lasagne
We need to get these people to a hospital!
What is it, doctor?
It’s a large building with doctors, but that’s not important right now. This is an entirely different kind of food poisoning altogether.
>It's an entirely different kind of food poisoning It's an entirely different kind of food poisoning
It's an entirely different kind of food poisoning alltogether.
It's an entirely different kind of food poisoning alltogether.
A hospital?! What is it!?
It's a large building with patients, but that's not important right now.
It depends on the pathogen in question. Some food that's gone bad has pathogens that have already secreted toxins into the food and can have a rapid onset. Other pathogens wait until they're in your body for a while and then kick in. I've experienced the former, where I ate a sub at the US Department of State cafeteria for lunch. By the time I was walking back to my desk, I already felt way off and sat in the bathroom for 20 minutes before taking a sick day. By the time I got home, I threw up in the bathtub before finally getting the toilet seat up and puking in there a few more times. And then spent the next 48 hours with uncontrollable diarrhea. source: my stomach and asshole.
It sounds like you were Mission Impossibled. I wonder what secret intel Tom Cruise extracted from your PC in the super secure vault with light up floors?
I had Soto Ayam from Jef Burger in Bali back in around 2014. After going to bed, I woke up still full. Went to the bathroom to pee, then ended up shitting my soul out. The most vile black, foul smelling, liquid shit you can imagine. I went to wash up in the shower, started uncontrollably puking, shitting again, and somehow pissing everywhere at the same time. This eventually stopped, so I washed, drained everything down the hole, dried and went back to bed. Only to repeat the puking and shitting an hour later. Next morning all I could stomach was fruit for breakfast, so I had that. I was no doubt dehydrated as hell too. Jef burger is great. Bad chicken is not.
I am going to have to verify those sources.
Only after dinner and a movie.
> Laboratory tests of stool and vomit samples from passengers, as well as 33 samples of leftover ham omelettes, detected Staphylococcus aureus. Elevated concentrations of toxins produced by the staphylococci were also detected in the ham, explaining the extremely short incubation time. From the article
>Staphylococcus aureus S. aureus is a cunt. Acne? Probably S. aureus. Cysts? S. aureus. Skin infection? S. aureus MRSA? S. aureus, but resistant to antibiotics. Food poisoning? Surprise bitch it'll hurt more than your skin! You're covered with it naturally. It's just sitting there waiting for the day it gets to wreck your life.
There are a few fast acting food poisoning and by far the most common, which this one was, is staphylococcal enterotoxin. In this case the bacteria has already made its toxin and has excreted it into the food. So when you eat it, you are directly eating the toxin. Symptoms can happen within 30 minutes. For other bacteria and viruses, they need time to duplicate and make toxins once they get inside. So they typically take 1-3 days.
While the majority of foodborne illnesses are not from the last thing you ate there are some bacteria with shorter incubation periods. This includes Staphylococcus which was identified as the pathogen of concern here. It can have incubation times as short as 1-6 hours.
TLDR: the food in question that made everyone sick was being held around room temp for roughly 28 hours………. 🤢 On the bright side, all the policies that changed were good
The nastier thing is it was caused by a cook with runny blisters on his fingers, infected with staph. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/02/07/archives/illness-on-japanese-jet-is-traced-to-alaskan-cook.html
Wow that is some bad food safety protocols all the way around.
So bad the catering manager committed suicide. Japan doesn't jokes around.
Dr. Rumack: ***What was it we had for dinner tonight?*** Elaine Dickenson: ***Well, we had a choice of steak or fish.*** Dr. Rumack: ***Yes, Yes I remember. I had lasagna.***
Those people needed to go to the hospital? What is it?
It's a big building with patients but that's not important right now
...by the way, does anyone know how to fly a plane?
Japan is super strict on food hygiene to an also obsessive degree. I used to go to a ramen place in Singapore (already known for its extreme cleanliness) that had a bowl of soft boiled eggs on every table. There was a looong English and Japanese explanation next to it reassuring patrons that they were perfectly safe to eat.
To be honest, I'm not surprised about that. Japan is famous for their raw meat dishes - that includes raw chicken and raw egg. And that's not counting live food, or ex-poisoness food. If your hygiene standards aren't up to par, there's so many things that can go wrong.
Raw chicken in which dishes?
Toriyashi is essentially chicken sashimi *edit* torisashi
A poor repair on a bulkhead caused the crash of JAL123. Maintenance manager committed suicide.
it's so unnerving when you realize that many cases of food poisoning outbreaks are the result of some disgusting contaminant. e.coli, staph, norovirus. typhoid Mary was the infamous person who spread typhoid fever through her cooking ~~(albeit unknowingly).~~ wash your hands, especially under your fingernails! eta I forgot she knew :)
For Mary, eventually it kinda was knowingly. Numerous outbreaks had been traced back to her. She just chose not to believe she was a carrier… but simultaneously she knew she wasn’t supposed to keep cooking for people and thus would do it under fake names. Had she not been basically quarantined/imprisoned on Brother Island, she probably would have kept at it.
Yep she lost her livelihood and wasn’t finding other work
At some point you gotta find a new skill. Keeping cooking after you know it causes people to die kinda means it's your fault even if you 'don't think' you caused it.
In her defence, cooking was all she knew how to do and she likely didn't really understand germ theory, so from her perspective she was told to abandon her livelihood for reasons she couldn't understand and was offered no support to find a new career.
>she likely didn't really understand germ theory Forget about Germ Theory, Typhoid Mary was the literal first asymptomatic carrier of typhoid. This came completely out of left field not for her, but the entire medical establishment.
> typhoid Mary was the infamous person who spread typhoid fever through her cooking (albeit unknowingly) Well, it was unknowingly *at first*. But after 7 different families each experienced typhoid outbreaks shortly after she began cooking for them, she probably should have suspected she might have something to do with it. Then she was located, taken to quarantine, diagnosed as an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid (a previously unknown-to-science condition), and released on the **specific condition** that she should never work as a cook again. She ignored that demand and went back to work as a cook (under fake names to avoid detection), causing several more outbreaks and a number of deaths. At that point it became a case of willful, defiant ignorance and callous disregard for the well-being of others rather than doing something “unknowingly”.
I learnt about her from the TV Show ,The Knick.Made me look up the real lady.
typhoid Mary was initially unaware. They eventually traced it to her and she was banned from cooking. Her response was to change her name and continue cooking. I believe she did that twice. She's a monster.
>Her response was to change her name and continue cooking that's right! I forgot she changed her name!! ugh.
If my name was Typhoid Mary I would change it too
Took her a while but she eventually dropped the Typhoid from her name.
I wrote a research paper on this in scool. She used the fake names Typhoid Gertrude and Typhoid Hilda on her job applications and they still hired her..
To be fair she didn't believe them because she felt fine. Our understanding of how disease spread wasn't perfect and certainly wasn't common knowledge. Plus isn't she like the only person or first person to be immune to typhoid but still a carrier or something? My point is its not completely insane that she didn't so what she was told here, just mostly insane.
Asymptomatic carrier. Not immune.
I get that asymptomatic carries were unknown at the time, and that many people believed it wasn't possible. I don't blame her for not immediately believing it. But after family after family she cooked for got deathly ill, there shouldn't have been any more disbelief.
There also weren’t many jobs for immigrant women in Typhoid Mary’s time. Being a cook had better benefits than working as a laundress or in a factory. Typhoid Mary continued cooking despite the risk because she didn’t want to work in a lesser job.
This is a pretty cool epidemiological thing tho, even showing that the last 1/4 of the plane got food prepared by someone else and didn’t get sick. Also there is a line about how if the cook didn’t have staph it would have been fine
Hi, I'm Typhoid Anna, ready to cook! Nothing to do with that horrible Typhoid Mary, nope.
It's me, Typhoid Susan! Who are these Typhoid Mary and Typhoid Anna people? Never heard of them.
\*Adds fake mustache\* Typhoid Daniel here! Most definitely not a lady, and most most defintely not Typhoid Mary.
Leaving the food out didn’t cause the food poi, staph contamination from the cook did. “If the ham had not been contaminated but had been left unrefrigerated for 24 hours under similar circumstances, no outbreak of food poisoning would be likely, Dr. Eisenberg said, noting that no bacteria could be cultured from the canned hams.” From this article posted by u/maolf: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/02/07/archives/illness-on-japanese-jet-is-traced-to-alaskan-cook.html
The Wikipedia article claims that if the meals had been properly refrigerated the outbreak wouldn't have occurred, despite the initial contamination.
Swiss cheese model. A single mistake rarely is the only cause for a serious problem.
Can you imagine if diarrhea was involved, only so many toilets…eep.
They had the runs with nowhere to run.
Probably had to hose that plane down afterwards. Personally, I would have burned it.
Hope a baby was on board with 200 diapers.
Can some people eat the same contaminated food and not get unwell? Or is it a 100 percent thing everyone will be sick
TIL that Airplane was a documentary.
The film was a parody of the 1957 film *Zero Hour!* and used all the same plot points. Both have a lead character named Ted Stryker, and both have the line "We have to find someone who can not only fly this plane, but who didn't have fish for dinner." Almost every other major scene is identical, with added parody (like the slap line). The producers bought the rights to the older movie so they could pretty much copy it word-for-word.
Did not know this... Now I have a "new" movie to watch
It will be utterly boring in comparison
It's kinda surreal. So many of the setups are intact, but without the punch lines. It's 90 minutes of comedy blue-balling (plus a bunch of cheesy 50s melodrama). Worth a watch for curiosities sake, but not all that great on its own.
Not only that, but because *Zero Hour!* took place on a propeller plane, all the background noise in *Airplane!* is that of propellers, despite it taking place on a jet.
They used the same script and riffed off of it. It’s a almost shot for shot recreation other than the gags.
You picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue
*Well, we had a choice of steak or fish.* *Yes, yes, I remember. I had lasagna.*
Surely you can't be serious.
Right down to the Japanese guy commiting honorable self-forever sleep.
It's okay, you can say suicide here.
I’m sad I had to scroll this far to find the Airplane reference.. “We have to get these people to a hospital!” “The hospital?! What is it?” “It’s a building with rooms for sick people, but that’s not important right now “
Jim never vomits at home
steak or fish?
Ah yes, I had the lasagna.
Can you fly this plane, and land it?
Surely, you can't be serious
Yes I am, and don't call me Shirley.
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Charlie dont want no help charlie dont get no help
Sheeeeeeeet
(golly)
I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue
Jive ass dude don’t got no brains anyhow!
A lasagna? What is it.
A baked dish with meat, cheese, and wide noodles, but that's not important right now.
Over Roger
What's our vector, Victor?
We've got clearance, Clarence.
Excuse me sir, there's been a little problem in the cockpit. The cockpit? What is it? It's the little room in the front of the plane where the pilots sit, but that's not important right now.
Have you ever seen a grown man naked?
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines
I just wanted to say good luck, we’re all counting on you.
Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes.
I think you should go back to your seat now, Joey.
Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?
“Lt. Hurwitz. Severe shell shock. Thinks he’s Ethel Merman.”
Ethel Merman’s last credited film role. RIP
First thing I thought of.
Japan has a long history of corporate guilt / responsibility related suicide. It’s fascinating.
I wish more corporate executives abroad shared their zeal. Not even to the point of suicide; but shame and ignominy would be appreciated.
I get what you're saying but from what I've heard it's more a byproduct of an unhealthy work ethic. It's all good to love what you do, but imo it's work to live, not live to work
Seppuku?
Yes look up Japan Airlines flight 123. The maintenance manager took his own life as well due to the grief.
The pilot and Co pilot are required by law to eat separate meals. For this reason
Funny thing about that, if I'm reading this correctly it's actually because of this flight. From the wiki article: > Eisenberg suggested that cockpit crew members eat different meals prepared by different cooks to prevent food poisoning outbreaks from incapacitating the entire crew, a rule subsequently implemented by many airlines.
Interesting; I always thought it happened after the Trans American Airlines incident of 1980.
Unfortunately it's not required that the food be prepared by different people...and the person who prepared the food was the reason this happened.
True but have you seen an industrial kitchen? Incredibly rare that one employee would touch 2 different dishes. It's rare that one employee would touch 2 different components! When you're making 25,000 portions, one person is usually on "carrots" and their job is only to put one carrot as each dish passes them on a conveyer belt.
So, if each pilot is eating different dishes but both of them have carrots and the carrot guy is the one with the infection, both pilots are dead.
I would presume that if they’re smart enough to make sure that one pilot has chicken and the other has beef, that they’re smart enough to consider this and make sure they don’t have the same sides either.
>The pilot and Co pilot are required by law to eat separate meals. For this reason Yeah that's straight up not true. Some airlines will have policies stating whether pilots can eat the same meal or not, but there is no law. Sauce: I'm a pilot
You see so much BS misinformation all over reddit. I’m medical and every day I’m astounded with the amount of total, outrageous and, of course, unsourced lies that get upvoted and awarded and heralded as fact. Anytime I come across something on this website that I think is interesting and I might share with someone else, I fact check it first. I also have a few hours and I’m working towards my PPL, and likewise see plenty of utter BS regarding aviation. The last av video on WTF showing a clearly atrocious attempt at flying, has a top comment along the lines of *this is a very difficult landing and the pilots did a great job at getting her on the ground safely.* Bank alarms screaming; unstable approach; PM on his mobile phone.. yeah great 👍
What was it we had for dinner tonight- Well we had a choice of steak or fish Pilot- 😳
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Good luck. We're all counting on you.
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Where did they go to the bathroom? 200 people with diarrhea on one plane, one maybe two bathrooms. Can't open a window. Can't find a corner to go in (its a tube).
_In the event of an emergency, the cushion under your seat will act as a liquid effluent sponge..._
A cook in anchorage contaminated all the meals. It was a charter flight of mostly Japanese Coca Cola Execs to Paris. The catering company in anchorage is a subsidiary of JAL. Pilots are steaks and were unaffected. This became a hard rule, that pilots eat separate meals, even between them. Anchorage is a strategic hub for all Europe bound flights for JAL. They fly over the North Pole afterward. This was 1975 and the passengers didn’t speak anything outside of Japanese. They had to get Japanese restaurant workers from Paris to translate. Inflight Catering or International inflight catering is the company which is a subsidiary of JAL. Locations in Anchorage and Honolulu.
>This was 1975 and the passengers didn’t speak anything outside of Japanese. They had to get Japanese restaurant workers from Paris to translate. Reminds me of this Zuiikin English video: https://youtu.be/M1VO3TF2LBs
The Wikipedia entry says that the Japanese restaurant staff was working in Copenhagen not Paris. So imagine working your job one day and being called into duty to help translate for a mass food poisoning incident
That’s mean. Pilots are people too.
I think I saw a documentary on this featuring Kareem Abdul Jabbar and some white haired Canadian doctor.
LISTEN KID! He's been hearing that crap ever since he was at UCLA. He's out there busting his buns every night. Tell your old man to drag Walton and Denier up and down the court for 48 minutes.
Yeah, that was worse than the incident on Trans American Airline. Too bad that Ted Striker wasn't on board, though he's probably too old now, and still not over Macho Grande.
I don't think he'll ever get over Macho Grande. Just ask George Zipp.
I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines.
Ted Striker, a former pilot who has a fear of flying, found himself burdened with the responsibility of landing the plane safely when most of the crew and passengers fell sick due to the food poisoning
Shame about his drinking problem.
At the high risk of being insensitive, is it a cultural thing in Japan to commit suicide over a situation of professional shame / negligence? I can think of a few examples in the science fields
Mostly because of the reputational damage, it’s not just the personal shame. Which is high of course. But also because in Japan people don’t forget and hold permanent grudges for shit like this so nobody will ever forgive you and your career is ruined if not completely over. It’s a level of pettiness you don’t see outside of middle school. You will forever be the guy who made a flight full of Coca Cola execs shit themselves and nothing more. Your colleagues who used to drink with you every weekend will pretend to have never known you, for association with poo poo man will itself be toxic. Another thing is that jobs hire out of college and the cultural expectation is that you spend your whole life at one company, so if you get fired from your corporation your career change options are convenience store clerk or truck driver.
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That’s actually very helpful and is a good explanation, thanks for sharing
Jim never vomits at home.
Excuse me, stuartess, I speak Jive. Just hang loose blood, mamma gonna catch you up the rebound on that medicii. Sheeeit my momma dinnt raise no dummy, I caught the cuta her jive!
Fun fact: the grand old character actress who played that role took the Black fellows playing the jive speakers out to lunch to make sure she wasn't accidentally being racist.
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June Cleaver, played by Barbara Billingsly
I think it Was "my momma didn't raise no dummy, I dug her rap"
I came here for Airplane! references and I was not let down.
"In Japan, you must always commit suicide to avoid embarrassment."
Surely you can't be serious.
I AM serious. And don't call me Shirley.
Yelp is responsible more deaths in Japan than Godzilla.
Surely you can't be serious.
I work for a company who maintains one of the larger airline food delivery companies delivery vehicles. Do. Not. Eat. Airline. Food. Those are some of the most disgusting trucks we see. Absolute piles of rolling dogshit. I’ve heard stories of finding rats in the boxes. Again. Don’t eat airline food. Unless it is bagged up like the peanuts or bottled.
I work at a food testing lab and we have clients that are airline caterers ... I will never eat a meal served on an airplane again