Can I Go To Court For Food Poisoning?
Michael Babboni
Personal Injury
It’s not something that many people think about, especially when you set out on the town for a nice night with a good meal, but occasionally even a simple activity like a dining experience can go wrong. Sometimes the unfortunate result of this is food poisoning, and while such an unpleasant experience can ruin an evening, some people do wonder, “Is this something I can take a restaurant to court for?”The answer, as with many cases where some kind of personal injury is involved is, “it depends.”
Proof & Severity
As with any other case that goes through our legal system, a case of personal injury—in this case food poisoning—against a restaurant, presumes innocence until proven guilty. This means that the burden of proof lies with you and your personal injury attorney to show a court enough evidence to allay any reasonable doubt that the restaurant was not involved.
This is where a case can become tricky, as many factors can play a part in just how solid a case you may have.
The first and most important thing you must determine is whether or not you have in fact suffered from food poisoning. The symptoms of food poisoning can vary, and there are other illnesses that you may be confusing with food poisoning. Stomach flu, for example, is contracted through contaminated food and water, but it can also be passed through touching or proximity with sick individuals. Stomach flu also has many of the same symptoms as some cases of food poisoning, so without a proper diagnosis from a medically trained professional, it’s quite easy to confuse the two.
If you can get a diagnosis from a doctor that unequivocally proves the source of your illness was from food poisoning, then you have much stronger grounds for your case. However, that brings us to the next step, which is determining whether the restaurant that provided you with your food was responsible for causing the food poisoning.
Depending on your activities for the remainder of that day, your food poisoning may have come from other sources. If you ate a restaurant, but then took in a movie with snacks, or attended a concert or sporting event that offered food, or even simply ate something later that evening and then fell ill, it’s possible that some other source than the restaurant may have caused your food poisoning.
This is where a few other factors may also have a big influence on how solid your case is. If, for example, you are not the only one that got food poisoning that night, and if other people who ate at the same restaurant also contracted food poisoning, this makes for a much, much stronger case. Multiple cases of food poisoning on the same date from the same location makes for compelling evidence in a court case. If you or anyone else had decided to bring home leftovers for the night, it might even be possible to get a lab analysis of that food for more direct, scientific evidence that will be extremely helpful in a court case.
The final thing that you’ll want to consider, even with all the other factors, is whether the food poisoning you experienced is worth pursuing a full blown court case.
In most typical instances, food poisoning may lead to nausea, diarrhea and a few other unpleasant symptoms, but these clear up in a day or two, and often only result in a very short period of illness and recovery. In such cases, the cost of the case in terms of times and expense may simply not be worth the effort. However, if the case is much more serious, involving food poisoning that results in a very serious illness like salmonella, which can last for several days, or e. coli, which can occasionally prove to be fatal, then there is much more motivation for everyone involved to start and resolve a case. If the food poisoning is serious enough that it requires hospitalization, especially if it actively threatens your life, then the stakes have changed dramatically.
Food poisoning is not ordinarily something that can result in a personal injury case, but if the circumstances are right, and the consequences are serious enough, this is definitely an instance where a St. Petersburg Personal Injury Lawyer would be interested in taking your case.