A 20-year-old student has died after eating pasta that had been left out on his kitchen benchtop for 5 days.

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The Belgian student known only as AJ became violently ill after eating the leftovers, which he had made 5 days earlier and stored at room temperature.

AJ must have thought he just had regular food poisoning and drank loads of water before climbing into bed to sleep it off.

The following morning he was found dead in his bed by his shocked parents.

AJ had actually gone out to play football after consuming the deadly meal, but ended up back home half an hour later with a headache, abdominal pain and nausea. He threw up for several hours but eventually got to sleep around midnight.

His worried parents discovered his lifeless body when they realised he hadn’t gotten up to go to college the next morning.

An autopsy revealed AJ died suddenly from food poisoning caused by a bacteria known as bacillus cereus. Tests carried out on the remaining leftovers found that there was so much bacteria, it caused his liver to completely shut down.

The National Reference Laboratory for Food-borne Outbreaks advises:

Many people eat pasta, or any other form of noodles, that are leftover for a day or two and they’re fine. But be careful of food left out for more than a few hours. If the food smells funny, it’s always better to be safe than sorry.

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Indeed, smell and taste exist for a reason and it’s really frustrating to think that AJ didn’t realise that something was amiss. I mean that pasta must have tasted absolutely rancid, never mind whatever funky smell was emanating from it. 

In fact, never mind a smell or taste test, my brain would be screaming at me not to eat 5-day-old pasta no matter how hungry I was. Even still, the worst you’d expect would be a bout of food poisoning, not to be dead by the next morning. RIP AJ and let this be a lesson to the rest of us when handling leftovers.

On that note, don’t eat anymore supermarket chicken until you’ve read this.