Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Many chicken flocks have birds that contain Campylobacter within their intestines but which produce no symptoms of any illness. Estimates vary, but more than half of the raw chicken on sale within the U.IK. is thought to have Campylobacter on it. The germ is also present in giblets, especially on the liver

Unpasteurised milk can become contaminated if the cow has a Campylobacter infection or if the milk is contaminated with manure. Because so few germs are needed to cause illness, it is very difficult to prevent contamination, even with the best dairy hygiene standards.

There is no vaccine against campylobacter nor do you become immune to it, so it's important to prevent it spreading and to avoid infection as far as possible.

We often have quite a mistake impression of what it was like to live in times past. This impression frequently comes from films, which often portray people who, although dressed in dirty clothes, are beautiful and live in harmony with nature. Unfortunately reality in the eighteenth century was quite different, as the reputable Princeton historian Lawrence Stone explains:

The almost total ignroance of both personal and public hygiene meant that contaminated food and water was a constant hazard ...

The result of these primitive sanitary conditions was constant outbursts of bacterial stomach infections, the most fearful of all being dysentery, which swept away many victims of both sexes and of all ages within a few hours or days. Stomach disorders of one kind or another where chronic, due to poorly balanced diet amont the rich, and the consumption of rotton and insufficient food among the poor. The prevalence of intestinal worms ... were a slow, disgusting and debilitating disease that caused a vast amount of human misery and ill health ... In the many poorly drained marshy areas, recurrent malarial fevers were common and debilitating diseases ... [and] perhaps even more heartbreaking was the slow, inexorable, destructive power of tuberculosis ...

For women, childbirth was a very dangerous experience ... [and finally] there was the constant thread of accidental death from neglect or carlessness or association with animals like horses - which seem to have been at least as dangerous as automobiles - or elements like water ...

Another fact of Early Modern life which is easy to forget is that only a relatively small proportion of the adult population at any given time was both healthy and attractive, quite apart from the normal features of smell and dirt. . .. Both sexes must very often have had bad breath from the rotting teeth, and constant stomach disorders which can be documented from many sources, while suppurating ulcers, eczema, scabs, running sores and other nauseating skin diseases were extremely common and often lasted for years. [Quotes from Stone 1979:62-4, 306]