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A couple of months ago, my husband and I went to Cuba to celebrate our one-year wedding anniversary. We planned the trip to a T: every meal, all of our excursions, where we’d grab morning coffees and midafternoon mojitos. We even bought fancy bottles to filter the local tap water—the travel guidelines we’d read indicated that bottled H2O was hard to come by and that we were at an increased risk of getting sick.
Despite our best efforts, though, within two days of returning to the US, my husband and I were shaking in bed with high fevers. Our stomachs were in knots and we were making non-stop bathroom, uh, runs. We had traveler’s diarrhea (TD for short), a gastrointestinal infection that causes loose stools and abdominal cramps, among other unpleasant, flu-like symptoms.
You get TD by ingesting some sort of pathogen (a bug like norovirus, bacteria such as E. coli, or even parasites like Giardia), typically via contaminated food or water, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Some countries don’t have the same level of public sanitation as we do in the States and you may also be exposed to germs abroad that aren’t as common here, Theresa Fiorito, MD, a pediatric infectious disease specialist and director of the family travel medicine center at NYU Langone Hospital—Long Island, tells SELF. When you’re exposed to these bugs—some of which your body rarely, if ever, encounters—they can trigger an infection and cause not only diarrhea, but also cramps, fever, and vomiting (as well as the why-the-hell-is-this-happening-to-me blues, in my experience).
Most cases are mild and resolve naturally within a few days, but some (like mine, lucky me!) can get quite serious and prevent you from going about your daily life. Either way, traveler’s diarrhea isn’t fun, and since I learned a thing or three from my battle with it, I’m here, along with Dr. Fiorito, to offer some guidance, should you travel internationally and get, to put it bluntly, the shits.
An important note: Before you consider any of the below steps, it’s best to check in with a primary care provider (PCP) or an urgent-care physician. Everyone’s different, and with TD you definitely want to do whatever your doctor says is going to help your body recover as quickly as possible. Okay, onto those recs.
Think twice about taking OTC diarrhea meds.
You may have treated past bouts of diarrhea with Imodium (or loperamide)—an over-the-counter antidiarrheal pill that can slow down an overactive gut—but it’s not always recommended for TD. Why? In certain cases, you actually want your body to expel the germs by, well, pooping, according to the Mayo Clinic. Though Imodium may ease the diarrhea, it can also keep harmful organisms in your body for longer.
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