Watch the Salsa

By Sanjay Gupta

An outbreak of hepatitis A at the Beaver Valley Mall outside Pittsburgh, Pa.--the largest recorded in U.S. history, with three dead and nearly 600 infected--has got doctors and folks who eat at ChiChi's scrambling to come to terms with a disease usually considered pretty benign, at least compared with its more deadly cousins, B and C. As thousands in the Pittsburgh area lined up for shots of immune globulin, which can stave off infection if given quickly enough, disease detectives from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) traced the problem to a bad batch of scallions, probably from Mexico.

So what is hepatitis A, and what can you do to keep from getting it? Like other forms of hepatitis, it's an inflammation of the liver caused by a virus. The symptoms, which include fever, nausea, diarrhea, jaundice, fatigue, abdominal pain and loss of appetite, usually clear up within a month or two. (Hepatitis B and C, by contrast, often cause chronic, incurable infections that can lead to cirrhosis and cancer of the liver.) Up to 200,000 Americans contract hepatitis A every year, often after eating shellfish taken from contaminated waters. But with our growing reliance on fresh foods imported from overseas, it's increasingly associated with vegetables that have been improperly cleaned or handled (say, by an infected worker who forgot to wash his hands after using the toilet).

Should we all just get hepatitis-A shots and be done with it? A vaccine has been available since 1995, and there are physicians, among them Dr. Philip Rosenthal at the University of California, San Francisco, who advocate adding it to the standard pediatric immunization schedule. But like most doctors, Rosenthal stops short of recommending the shots for otherwise healthy adults--unless, he adds, they travel overseas a lot. It's also important to remember, says Dr. Beth Bell of the CDC, that it's not just restaurant food or imported produce that is risky.

I, for one, am not quite ready to start cooking on my own. But I'm going to be extra careful about washing my hands--and very choosy about where and what I eat.

Sanjay Gupta is a neurosurgeon and CNN medical correspondent