Bowel movements are not usually the stuff of polite conversation. But, if you pick up the phone to find a "mature lady" asking you if you had the runs in the past four weeks, don't hang up. It's perfectly legitimate.
An all-Ireland, one-year telephone survey is being undertaken to determine the level of food poisoning in the population. By the end of December almost 10,000 people will have been asked whether they had gastrointestinal symptoms in the previous four weeks and the type of medical attention they sought.
Dr Thomas Quigley, of the Food Safety Promotion Board, which is co-sponsoring the project in co-operation with agencies North and South, said: "So far the response from the public is tremendous, and the information gathered is proving interesting and very useful.
"Only a small proportion of those who experience food-poisoning symptoms actually consult a doctor, and of those even fewer undergo tests to identify the particular cause of the illness."
Interviewees are chosen on a random basis and are regionally dispersed. "There are two trained interviewers, both mature ladies, one with a Northern accent and one with a Southern. They explain the importance of the survey as a public health issue and ask to interview the person in the house with the next birthday."
Children under 16 are interviewed with parental consent. Not even baby's nappies are sacred. If a baby is the person with the next birthday, then his or her parents are asked all about recent nappy fills.
So far, co-operation has been excellent, and preliminary results from the first two months of the survey indicate that the number of cases of food poisoning reported represents only about one-hundredth of the real problem.
This mirrors the results of a study in Britain in 1999 which found that of every 136 people who got food poisoning only one was recorded in the official statistics.
The study has caught the interest of prestigious Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta, in the US, and details of the project will be presented to them today by Dr Margaret Fitzgerald of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland. .
The survey is designed to estimate the economic and social impact on the community in terms of absenteeism from work or school and the costs to the health services.