Emergency

“We do see some blips after the actual holiday when people are heating up their food and keeping it maybe a little longer than they should be,” he added.

Those illnesses can be avoided by storing food within two hours of it being cooked.

“The danger temperature zone that you want to stay out of is 41 degrees up to 140 degrees, and of course the temperature in your house is probably somewhere between 70, 75, maybe even 80 as the oven has been on during the day,” said Pat Holmes, Family and Consumer Sciences educator with OSU Extension in Montgomery County.

Besides refrigerating food right after the meal is complete, Holmes said hosts should also pay attention to the containers they use to store the food.

“You don’t want to put it in big, deep, large round dishes. You want something to be shallow so that the temperature can get cooled faster in that way,” Holmes explained. “If you put it in smaller containers and then you stack them one on top of each other, you’ve just recreated the big, deep container situation for yourself.”

Holmes also said people should freeze their leftovers within the first day of it being cooked if they don’t plan to eat them within three to four days.

Avoiding cross-contamination by washing hands and surfaces frequently, as well as cooking food to the right temperature, will help avoid a trip to the ER for food poisoning.

However, some trips to the ER aren’t preventable, and Bhat said the ER is prepared for a busy Christmas week.

“We staff to volume, so we when we see peaks ...we usually staff up through that, so we try to be ready,” he said.