My gut feeling

I finally found out last week what my mystery abdominal pains were about: I've had giardia, a very common (if rare in rich countries) gut infection.

I'd actually suspected this already. Having travelled a fair bit through the developing world, I'd read all about giardia and recognised the combination of stomach cramps, no fever, and fatigue. The thing is though, the key symptom that every backpacker is sniggeringly aware of--what Wikipedia's prim medical jargon calls "foul flatus", and the rest of us would call incessant, eggy farts--was absent.

I took some tests last week that eventually confirmed it was giardia, and I've been on antibiotics all week to shake it off. The question everyone's asked me is how I got it--which is a reasonable point given that this is basically a traveller's disease and I haven't been anywhere more exotic than London and Queensland over the past year.

The answer, I think, is that people get giardia in developing countries because general hygiene is lower in those places. Giardia travels along the fecal-oral route--which isn't a scenic drive between two Portuguese villages, but fancy medical talk for getting crap in your mouth.

That can come from a street food vendor in Dhaka not washing their hands properly, or a baby wipe falling on your arm as you struggle to change a grumpy nappy. I'm very careful about the whole handwashing thing, but it only takes a speck to make you sick so at some point I must have picked it up--though Anya, interestingly, seems unaffected. Anyway, there's a lesson in all of this: parents of pre-toilet trained kids are basically living in a developing country, all the time.