Food-safety testing a brew - paranoid after I got a mystery infection&

[bingggo]

[SIZE=medium]In short, my questions are - has anyone read about homebrew causing infections in people; and is there a way to get your homebrew tested if you really want to?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=medium]The long version is [/SIZE][SIZE=medium]I was hospitalised last October with a mystery infection, charmingly diagnosed as 'sepsis of unknown origin'. My specialist tested and scanned me for every possible thing under the sun with nil results. 'Unknown origin' is apparently common, in 30-50% of cases. Perhaps because the buckets of antibiotics they give you kills the bug before they find it.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=medium]My wife has pointed the accusing finger at my 25 litres of wild yeast cider that I had been sampling from the fermenter and have since been a bit nervous about bottling! [/SIZE]I assume it 'may' be 'possible' that sampling this brew made me sick - if not the wild yeasties, perhaps some acrobatic rodent crawled over the carboy bung and contaminated that, which may have even subsequently infected the brew.

Having said that, it all seems rather unlikely, and the cider in the fermenter still smells and looks fine. It seems even more unlikely since yesterday when my dentist found I had a low-grade root canal infection that could be the culprit.

But I'm still interested none-the-less on the questions above

[SIZE=medium]Regards,[/SIZE]
[SIZE=medium]B[/SIZE]

 

[Yob]

Take it to the doctor and get a pathology test done?

 

[manticle]

No known pathogen can live in beer.

However known pathogens can live in soft cider - how do you know it's wild yeast? What gravity did it get to?

 

[Mr. No-Tip]

I was doing a spontaneous beer ferment recently and was told that someone had heard that someone had said (trying to emphasise the anecdotal evidence here) that you shouldn't sample a spontaneous until alcohol has started to form due to botulism risk.

Don't know if there's any truth to it. If your cider had botulism I suspect you'd be dead.

pH would be a factor as well. I'd imagine a cider would be pretty acidic and unfavourable to pathogens?

In terms of being sure it's alcoholic enough to be safe, can gravity drop without alcohol forming? I've heard of lactic cultures that produce sourness without alcohol. Are they burning sugar to do so?