Woman who ate local dish while traveling reveals it triggered painful disease that has no cure
Topics: Health, World News, TikTok
Lucy Devine
Featured Image Credit: Getty stock images
Topics: Health, World News, TikTok
A woman who ate a local street food dish while traveling abroad has revealed how it triggered a lifelong disease for which there is no cure.
Over on TikTok, @ellaaa_rhian shared a video of herself laughing while lying on a beach, captioned: "She doesn't know it yet but on this holiday she's going to eat street food and get food poisoning, which will trigger an autoimmune disease with no cure which will make her chronically ill for the rest of her life."
After sharing the video, Ella received thousands of comments from people begging to know what the disease was and what food she had eaten to cause her to become so unwell.
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"I have ulcerative colitis which is an inflammatory bowel disease, it's in the same family as Crohns," said Ella.
"It's not to be confused with IBS, IBS is just your stomach, IBD is an autoimmune disease so it comes with a lot of other problems in your body.
"Chronic fatigue, joint pain, I get really dry eyes, I get super ill, I got almost sepsis from a mosquito bite.
"It has no cure, there are so many autoimmune diseases."
Ulcerative colitis is a chronic condition that occurs when you have inflammation and ulcers in your colon.
Cleveland Clinic explain that sufferers usually have periods of flare-ups followed by periods of remission.
Symptoms can get worse over time, but often begin with diarrhea; increased bowel movements or episodes of diarrhea; urgent bowel movements; tenesmus and abdominal pain.
Although the cause of UC is complex, researchers agree it is related to an overactive immune response, which mistakenly attacks the body.
Ella explained she'd been repeatedly asked which country she was in and what she had eaten when she became unwell.
"It doesn't matter where I was or what I ate, I'm genetically predisposed to getting autoimmune diseases, it was laying dormant obviously and I had no idea," she said.
"It's not a dirty country... if someone from that country ate what I ate they would be perfectly fine I'm sure.
"I was in Vietnam for my cousin's wedding. There's two things I think it could have been, I ate a banh mi off the side of the road from a food cart - they're everywhere, it's not unusual to do that."
Ella explained that the food wasn't hot when she ate it, but she didn't feel unwell afterwards.
Two days later, Ella ate some lobster at her cousin's wedding, which she said was piping hot.
"The next night was when I started feeling unwell," she explained.
"The lobster was piping hot and it was cooked through, but those are the two things... one was uncooked, and one was something that I don't usually eat."