E. coli in a rare hamburger put a Michigan man in the hospital for 10 days. Kevin McDermed told WOOD-TV that he feels “lucky to be alive” after surviving the life-threatening infection that made him feel as though his insides were “full of battery acid.”
McDermed is one of five people who are part of an E.coli outbreak in Michigan where authorities say ground beef is suspected as the source. The Michigan residents are from five different counties: Ottawa and Kent in the western part of the state, and Livingston, Oakland, and Washtenaw in the southeast. All of them ate the contaminated beef at restaurants where it was served rare or undercooked.
Symptoms of E.coli poisoning don’t set in immediately after eating contaminated food. It usually takes between three and seven days before they start to appear. So the rare hamburger he had eaten several days before was not the first thing McDermed thought of when he began to experience excruciating abdominal pain and bloody diarrhea. He says he had no idea what was going on or how sick he was even as he battled the infection during a 10-day hospital stay.
