Clean vs. Dirty Dining

After nearly six weeks here, I have not experienced any problems with food or water. Here's one of my favorite dishes: bami goreng or nasi goreng, an Indonesian staple that is made with rice or noodles and usually served with a fried egg on the top. The Maldivian version usually involves tuna and delicious spices. Most restaurants prominently display signs reminding everyone to wash their hands and we saw quite a few kitchen workers wearing plastic gloves.

So tonight's top story is pretty shocking: Doctors at the country's biggest public hospital are hospitalized with salmonella food poisoning they apparently contracted from eating chocolate mousse served by a caterer at a party. The caterer runs a well known restaurant. Health care is scarce here and people with serious illnesses often fly to India or Sri Lanka for treatment if they can afford it. Having all your doctors become patients in the hospital only makes an overloaded system worse. Radio broke the story at 1:30 and TV is following up with a complete package at 8 pm.

Update: Outstanding team coverage of the sick doctors on TVM, with Waseem doing a live phoner from the hospital. Shifla and Zihunath also contributed. We hope to follow up with a "dirty dining" segment on how the Food and Drug Authority inspects restaurants. They don't have letter grades in the windows... yet.

We were puzzled when we first got a script that said the doctors were suffering from "loose motion." That turns out to be the local euphemism for diarrehea.