What I learned:

* If you're already very sick, take antibiotics! Your good bacteria are not going to help fight the bad bacteria at this point.

* Don't take antibiotics before you get sick. That really WILL kill your good bacteria and increase your chance of getting bad bacteria.

* Immodium does NOT lengthen the duration of the illness.

* Only eat steaming-hot food and drink while traveling. Avoid fruit and raw vegetables at all costs. That probably means anything in the salsa or raita category!

When you say "Immodium does not lengthen the duration of the illness", I take that to mean that you should always bring some Immodium with you and use it if you get diarrhea.

Am I reading that correctly?

Immodium contains some synthetic opiate that apparently paralyzes areas of the intestinal tract. I can't speak for its effectiveness, but it may not be necessary to rely on multinational pharmaceutical sources. When I ate some contaminated food in a small town in Spain in the 1980s, I purchased a very local OTC medicine (small grey tablets in a glass vial, its name lost to history) that contained actual opium derivatives. It worked FAST.

Gary, thanks!

For countries that offer real Opium derivatives OTC, that sounds like a serviceable solution.

For other countries, I guess big pharm synthetic opiates will have to do.