she makes me so unsure of myself

The stairwell and a skylight with hot-pink louvers.

this is not life-threatening, but also who wants weeks of diarrhea and a fucking parasite in them lol. if you suspect you've already had this and it's passed, i would see a doctor. you might need an antiparasitic anyway. if you're actively sick, see a doctor and they might be able to prescribe medication to help you get over it faster.

try to avoid eating raw vegetables, scrub fruit with a produce brush and rinse thoroughly with water. again, don't bother with premade greens or bagged salads. if you buy lettuce, remove the outer 2-3 layers of leaves.

respectfully, this is a very classic case of "people on Tumblr who self-admittedly don't know anything about the etiology or pathophysiology of a foodborne outbreak saying confidently incorrect things in a fear-mongering way." this reblog is going around on a post with thousands of notes and unnecessarily scaring and misinforming possibly hundreds or thousands of people.

cyclospora cayetanensis generally causes:

self-limiting^1 explosive/watery diarrhea & associated cramping/nausea/fatigue/weight loss

sometimes low-grade fever, vomiting, body aches, and other flu-like symptoms

^1 this means the infection will ultimately resolve itself, even without treatment

if left untreated, the course of the infection may last a few days up to a month or longer. it can often follow a relapsing course, wherein the person recovers for a period before experiencing another bout of the illness (e.g. in the more prolonged infections). in the large majority of cases where an immunocompetent person is infected, they will recover without any complications. as with any infectious disease, immunocompromised people are at higher risk and should follow more stringent avoidance precautions + seek treatment more urgently if ill.

incubation period ranges from 2 days to 2 weeks; if you come down with symptoms after eating fresh fruits or veggies/drinking contaminated water (or suspecting that cross-contamination with fresh fruits/vegetables/water has occurred), you should see a provider and get an O&P done to check your stool for evidence of the parasite. it can be treated with the medication TMP-SMX to shorten the course of the illness.

the "for reference, malaria is also caused by a protozoan" line as an attempt to provide context or reference point for how afraid people should be is uninformed fearmongering. this line is like if i said "be careful not to come down with a case of bacterial food poisoning--for reference, the black plague is also caused by bacteria!" it is completely nonsensical to imply that this organism is going to leave the average person reading the reblog surviving 'scathed,' as it were, or even not surviving at all, simply because there's another, different single-celled eukaryote that happens to cause malaria. you could have people going to their doctors afraid that they have something like malaria over what ultimately generally amounts to a treatable stomach flu.

and implying that cyclospora cayetanensis is inherently worse or more likely to be lethal than a bacterial infection, simply because it's "bigger and more complicated," is equally out of touch with the realities of bacterial infection. viewing bacterial food poisoning as "dangerous, but something you can expect to weather and survive unscathed" while seeing all parasitic infections as automatically akin to malaria is, quite simply, the result of having heard less about parasitic infections, and automatically assuming that the thing you (think you) know less about is scarier and worse by dint of being unfamiliar. go read about hemolytic uremic syndrome in addition to the above-linked articles on cyclospora, and then think about if e. coli should be de facto implicitly framed as no big deal compared to any given parasitic infection.