Undercooked bear meat linked to outbreak of rare parasitic disease in U.S.
Undercooked bear meat identified as probable source of outbreak of rare parasitic disease
Don't try to be Kennedy.
Is it brain worms?
Kinda. Trichinosis will eat your eyeballs eventually if allowed to progress far enough.
I'm vegan but when people question my manhood, I tell them I love eating bear balls and I invite them to a hunt. Then, when we finally find a bear with balls that are worthy of me breaking my veganism, I just run. I usually only invite stupid people who are not more athletic than myself. It works out. Everyone gets a story to tell.
"When coming upon a dragon while adventuring with a halfling, one need not outrun the dragon, only the halfling."
So does your lawyer have to be vegan too or nah
But how do I get him into the woods where the bears are?
Trichinosis is rumoured to be "what done for" the franklin expedition to find the north west passage.
The Jens Monk expedition lost 62 men to Trichinosis, and returned home with only 3 men alive.
https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/jens-munk-an-expedition-ahead-of-its-time/
I love reading about these guys, just so courageous. I'm sat here looking at spreadsheets worrying about emails. These guys did the equivalent of flying to mars in a washing machine, battling ferocious martians, succumbing to a war of attrition against a mysterious ailment, before un-dying and coming back home.
Andrew Tate could learn some serious lessons about what a real badass is from these cats. I’d like to see Tate vs. Shackleton in his prime.
Really cool read, thanks for sharing.
Other than the large number of people, this is not much of a story. Living in a place where bear hunting has a legal season, ( it just finished up here), how to properly cook bear meat is well known. So the risk is virtually zero. This sounds like a case of an ignorant cook serving badly prepared food. Not much different than a cook serving salad greens that were improperly washed and poisoning a large number of people with salmonella.
The moral of the story is: Learn how to cook foods properly with proper sanitation if you are going to serve a bunch of people. And the knowledge of how to it properly is a mere google search away.
Right? This is just poor understanding of food safety. People that practice poor food safety have a higher chance of getting foodborne illness. Shocking.
Wild game especially should be handled with care because it has a higher risk of contamination. If this was an outbreak of Trichinosis from eating undercooked farm raised pigs that would at least be marginally news worthy. Getting it from undercooked wild game is like borderline expected.
Fuck anyone who hunts bears.
There is a natural order to prey and predators.
If you're going to hunt a predator, and it's not for sanctioned wildlife management culls, get a Bowie knife and have at it. Otherwise, I hope you suffer a horrible death.
I'm not anti-hunting, at all. Hunting is easily the most humane way to eat meat. But hunting predators is a sport, not subsistence.
You can pretty much guarantee that anyone who hunts predators for sport, is a gigantic asshole and you should not feel bad about wishing them harm. I would take that statement even further, but I don't want the mods to remove this comment.
To be clear, no one likes bear meat, they're opportunistic scavengers. These bears were hunted for sport most likely, but the hunters were slightly better than your average bear hunting asshole, and at least didn't waste the meat. Most likely because it would be a wasted kill, and illegal.
I wish gun owners would advocate more for hunting invasive species, like in the US there's too many feral hogs and nutria.
They do. Texas allows ariel hunting of hogs, there's no season, and no tag limit. I know lots of other areas have similar approaches of differentiating hunting laws and seasons when it comes to invasive species.
All the hunters I've known, have been an outdoor guys and nature conservationists, but also conservative usually.
The California Grizzly was hunted to extinction for a number of reasons, but among them was that it was said to be delicious. Black bears aren’t really meat scavengers - they eat a lot of insects, berries, and some foliage. Actually pretty similar to the diet of a chicken. Tuna eat more meat than bears.
I thought this disease sounded familiar. Trichinosis - Wikipedia
While the most common vector in the U.S. is now bear meat, that wasn’t always the case. The most common human infection vector used to be undercooked pork!
Many older folks won’t touch pork unless it’s well done, because apparently these parasites make your muscles feel like they’re on fire.
A history teacher (many years ago) even told my class that trichnosis was the reason Jewish people don’t eat pork. (A quick internet search throws water on that. Doesn’t rule it out, but it’s not guaranteed to be correct, either.)
While I agree that hunting apex predators (or, really, any sport hunting) is kind of dumb, I do want to note that pigs famously eat slop and bathe in their own shit and bacon is delicious. Which is to say, we probably can’t assume taste based on diet/lifestyle
Yep, my grandmother went through the Great Depression and didn't eat pork unless it was well done. For example, bacon had to be crispy.
Turns out trichinosis can kill children, and not silently in their sleep.
These days, commercial pork is highly regulated and safer to the point you only have to be cautious with smaller ranches.
Unpasteurized milk has a similar story, but my grandmother swore drinking that as a child was why she never had osteoporosis.
Me? It's 2024, most food lacks nutritional value, so I cook everything to temp and take supplements
I’m not anti-hunting, at all. Hunting is easily the most humane way to eat meat.
Ironically, hunting deer is now necessary here in Indiana because people hunted all the bears and wolves to extinction and now the deer population explodes and they all starve to death if hunters don't keep the population in check.
There is a certain case I advocate bear hunting: bears that gain a proclivity for human environments or for humans as prey. It's rare, though, and can (and should) be handled by wildlife management personnel whenever reasonable.
Yes, I specifically excluded sanctioned/lawful wildlife management practices.
Unfortunately you'll see this a lot with polar bears, which is one of the reasons why proper waste management is so critical in Arctic towns/villages.
Poor waste management practices are capable of attracting more than just polar bears, but they are the most dangerous, for a host of reasons.
What a fucking weird take. Hunting is fine but only some animals. Something about the natural order yadayada.
There's prey animals, like deer. Those are hunted for subsistence, to eat and use.
Predators do not taste good, they taste bad in fact. They are not hunted for subsistence to feed your family, they're hunted for sport. They are killed for fun, so assholes can stuff them and mount their heads on walls.
So yeah, there's a difference. Either you yourself, like to hunt predators for sport, or you have no experience with, or knowledge of, hunting at all. Either way, your take is awful.
If I'm eating meat from a wild animal I'm cooking it long and slow to kill anything it might have.
My favorite is putting some deer meat and sauerkraut in a crock pot for 6-8 hours and slapping it on toasted rolls with mustard. A friend did that with a deer they hit with a car and it was amazing and I don't think I have any brain worms.
That’s what the brain worms want you to think
They think of it as a sauna.
Just get it tested for chronic wasting disease if that's a thing in the area you live. Cooking probably can't kill that, as it's a prion disease.
Is chronic wasting disease communicable between species? I thought prions were species-specific.
Edit: I was curious and looked it up. It’s not currently communicable to humans but that could change as the prion evolves. Avoid eating infected meat, though it probably won’t affect you, being patient zero would suck.
Prions are scary.
Pretty sure Maui's handled worse, should be good. Deer works well low and slow? I have almost no experience with it, woulda figured that'd work badly with how lean it is.
Low and slow is often the best way with lean meat, especially with some veg to keep it moist. I wouldn't be surprised if something in the sauerkraut acts as a tenderizer too, the fermenty-guys or the acidity or something.
I always thought it was bad to eat meat from carnivores. No idea where I heard that, but I've always accepted it as truth.
Biomagnification is a thing, but people still eat tons of carnivores, like fish.
Eg for biomagnification is tuna has a high amount of mercury.
I don't think that applies in a broad sense if you include fish , but everything I know about bear meat says that you have to cook the shit out of it specifically to kill the many parasites that the bear'a immune system keeps at bay (but doesn't completely destroy) while it's alive. Eating rare bear meat is incredibly stupid.
Eating any rare wild game is stupid.
You’re eating a wild animal, you have no idea what it’s been eating, drinking, or rolling around in. Cook the hell out of it.
Last time I made elk, I slow cooked it for like 8 hours. It was fall apart tender, but it had been in boiling broth for many hours. You can make delicious meals with wild game, you just have to cook it right.
Iirc it's the liver of carnivores you cannot eat. It has a really high Vitamin A content and can be toxic.
Edit it was Vitamin A
If I remember correctly they usually have more gamey meat
The reasons not to eat a carnivore are the exact same reasons not to eat an herbivore, just some of them more so. The higher the trophic level of your food, the more bioaccumulation. There is no rational reason to eat animals when bountiful alternatives exist.
I think this was reported a few weeks ago when it first came out. Crazy how even the vegans caught it from cross-contamination, that bear must have been riddled with them.
Who is eating bears?
Probably Libertarians in New Hampshire.
people that want to follow the substance hunting rules.
That's a funny typo 😆
Yeah for real. Bear is so gamey. It's really only worth eating in a stew, cooked until it's beyond well done and falling apart.
Maybe the Libertarians from A Libertarian walks into a bear finally found a solution to their bear problem.
Hopefully it was a bunch MAGATs and the bear got the last laugh. RIP Mr. Bear.
Circle of life.
If you get the parasite, just eat some of the bear's liver.
carnism = death
Down with carnism!
Lmao is that like dollar store version opposite day vegan? A dang ol' carnist? lol bro that shit is stupid. Tray saying it in the mirror, you'll see. Lmao dumbass
Don't try to be that Kennedy.
JFK's daughter Caroline seems to be a basically sensible person.
never go full RFKjr.
There's a chance higher than zero that RFKjr has brain slugs.