he ate six times a day , Kruse began to improve , and made a full recovery without dialysis . Food poisoning from strains of E. coli is less common in the United States than salmonella , a bacteria that has caused more than 1,000 infections in a recent outbreak since April , according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . Tomatoes have been implicated in this outbreak , but many other foods , such as raw meat and poultry , can spread salmonella and other kinds of bacteria . Food borne illnesses result in more than 300,000 hospitalizations in the United States every year , according to the CDC . About 76 million cases of food borne disease occur annually in the United States , the CDC said . Salmonella and E. coli present themselves in such similar ways that doctors ca n't tell which is which without testing a stool sample . Learn more about the differences between salmonella and E. coli '' Both kinds of bacteria can lead to infections involving diarrhea , vomiting , abdominal cramps and sometimes a low-grade fever . In most cases , an infected person will recover within a week
-LRB- CNN -RRB- -- Dan Kruse started to feel weak one day while hanging out with his friends in a park . The next day , the eighth-grader woke up completely jaundiced -- the whites of his eyes were yellow -- and he urinated blood . Dan Kruse , now 23 , had food poisoning from E. coli bacteria as a teenager . Deeply concerned , his mother took him to the doctor , who told him to go to the hospital immediately . Doctors determined he had a severe form of food poisoning that made his kidneys shut down in a condition known as hemolytic uremic syndrome , caused by the bacteria E. coli . A priest gave him last rites , and doctors said he would most likely spend the rest of his life on kidney dialysis . `` I did n't go to the bathroom at all for seven to nine days because of my kidneys shutting down , '' said Kruse , now a Web developer in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania . `` I definitely almost died . '' But with the help of an experimental treatment involving medicine `` like a fine grain sand '' that