[HN Gopher] Feral pig meat transmits rare bacteria
___________________________________________________________________
Feral pig meat transmits rare bacteria
Author : abawany
Score : 147 points
Date : 2025-03-19 17:17 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Interestingly, on the front page right now is a discussion titled
| "The Origin of the Pork Taboo"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410885
| fxtentacle wrote:
| And this article says "study from Saudi Arabia, where Brucella
| is endemic", which I'd say would be a pretty compelling reason
| not to eat pigs in Saudi Arabia.
| jajko wrote:
| I presume you know nothing about islam, but pigs are off the
| table (and kitchen) without exception. I don't think there is
| a way to buy it there, same as beef in India for example
| (even pork I never saw on any menu some 15 years ago when
| spending 6 months backpacking there, and I saw literally 1
| pig altogether in those 6 months).
| Hojojo wrote:
| From how I understand it, pigs became taboo _because_ they
| are a common disease vector. There 's nothing fundamentally
| different between pigs, horses, and cows/bulls which would
| otherwise motivate banning one over the other. One could
| apply the same thing to cows in India, where the benefits
| of keeping cows (milk, dung, labor) outweigh the benefits
| of slaughtering them for food while also being more
| sustainable.
| frontfor wrote:
| Yes, since there's nothing more powerful than religious
| belief, how do you teach a population to avoid doing a
| particular risky thing? By codifying it as an iron-clad
| zero-tolerance word-of-god holy decree, so much so that
| adherents aren't even cognisant of the mechanism at play.
| hoseyor wrote:
| You're being rather spiteful and conceited with your
| hindsight. For all intents and purposes, the risk to
| people in the past of losing anyone to some disease they
| didn't even know existed, which was not only disabling
| but also drained resources and energy from the whole
| group, would have simply not allowed "non-iron-clad"
| rules that could have led to the total destruction of the
| tribe/group.
|
| Those religious iron-clad decrees could very well be the
| only reason any of us exist at all, because it allowed
| people to not just forget, e.g., that time when the tribe
| ate a big pig feast and 99% of the tribe died.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| I would say that these kinds of religious edicts
| discourage investigation and development. The authority
| to elaborate on dietary taboos is then an expert on an
| ancient language, (trying to tell if an animal is "cloven
| hoof" by a murky description) rather than a scientist.
| Any God not spiteful nor conceited would want us to learn
| how to boil water; to learn by using thought.
| sorokod wrote:
| > how do you teach a population to avoid doing a
| particular risky thing?
|
| Why should health risk vectors be framed as religious
| prohibitions? Shouldn't accumulated observations and
| common sense, developed since the early Iron Age, be
| sufficient?
|
| For example, in Judaism, the prohibition of pork
| consumption [1] is completely unrelated to health risks.
| Alternatively, are Christians immune to Brucellosis?
|
| [1] https://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0311.htm
| graemep wrote:
| > For example, in Judaism, the prohibition of pork
| consumption [1] is completely unrelated to health risks.
| Alternatively, are Christians immune to Brucellosis?
|
| Possibly at much lower risk. It appears that this
| particular dangerous form of brucellosis is not even
| distributed across regions and this case seems to related
| to feral rather than farmed pork.
|
| The Greeks in the eastern Mediterranean at the time did
| eat pork, presumably without a high disease risk, so I
| would guess the risk was lower in the populations and
| places from which non-Jewish early Christians came.
| sorokod wrote:
| Not an epidemiologist and will deffer to you on
| brucellosis distribution.
|
| From religious perspective, the prohibition was lifted by
| divine decree somewhere in the 1st century (since Peter,
| first-century Jew living in Judea, is mentioned).
| Reported in Acts 10:
|
| ... Peter went up on the roof to pray.
|
| 10 He became hungry and wanted something to eat, but
| while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance.
|
| 11 He saw heaven open and something like a large sheet
| being let down to earth by its four corners.
|
| 12 It contained all kinds of four-footed animals and
| reptiles of the earth, as well as birds of the air.
|
| 13 Then a voice said to him: "Get up, Peter, kill and
| eat!"
|
| 14 "No, Lord!" Peter answered. "I have never eaten
| anything impure or unclean."
|
| 15 The voice spoke to him a second time: "Do not call
| anything impure that God has made clean."
|
| ---
|
| https://biblehub.com/acts/10.htm
| bentley wrote:
| Well, this divine decree isn't talking about food. It's
| actually a metaphor for Christianity opening its doors to
| Gentile converts instead of just Jews. This is how Peter
| himself interpreted it:
|
| 27 As Peter talked with him, he went inside and found
| many people gathered together.
|
| 28 He said to them, "You know how unlawful it is for a
| Jew to associate with a foreigner or visit him. But God
| has shown me that I should not call any man impure or
| unclean.
|
| 29 So when I was invited, I came without objection. I
| ask, then, why have you sent for me?"
|
| ...
|
| 34 Then Peter began to speak: "I now truly understand
| that God does not show favoritism,
|
| 35 but welcomes those from every nation who fear Him and
| do what is right.
|
| 36 He has sent this message to the people of Israel,
| proclaiming the gospel of peace through Jesus Christ, who
| is Lord of all."
|
| A better passage would be Mark 9:17, which explicitly
| talks about food:
|
| 14 Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, "Listen
| to me, everyone, and understand this.
|
| 15 Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into
| them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that
| defiles them."
|
| 17 After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his
| disciples asked him about this parable.
|
| 18 "Are you so dull?" he asked. "Don't you see that
| nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile
| them?
|
| 19 For it doesn't go into their heart but into their
| stomach, and then out of the body." _(In saying this,
| Jesus declared all foods clean.)_
|
| 20 He went on: "What comes out of a person is what
| defiles them.
|
| 21 For it is from within, out of a person's heart, that
| evil thoughts come--sexual immorality, theft, murder,
|
| 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy,
| slander, arrogance and folly.
|
| 23 All these evils come from inside and defile a person."
| sorokod wrote:
| > It's actually a metaphor for Christianity opening its
| doors to Gentile converts instead of just Jews.
|
| Yep,come and bring your yummy pork and fried calamari
| metaphor.
| pton_xd wrote:
| > For example, in Judaism, the prohibition of pork
| consumption [1] is completely unrelated to health risks.
|
| What's the reasoning behind not eating pork then? The
| link you posted calls pigs "unclean" right?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| It's currently unknown where the prohibition came from.
| It seems to have appeared during the finalization of the
| Torah sometime between the second and fifth centuries
| BCE. Pigs were widely grown and eaten in that period.
| lupusreal wrote:
| What's the reason for all their other rules? People
| fixate on pork because that's the one rule which seems to
| have a rational basis, but the Jewish religion (and
| others) have _tons_ of rules which are much wackier. What
| 's the basis for their rule banning the mixing of wool
| with linen, but permitting either or by themselves?
|
| Probably it was some ancient schizo that got his
| harebrained nonsense written down, or it was just a power
| flex over adherents as cults do, or some mix of the two.
| Assuming that these religious rules must have an
| underlying rational basis is foolish. Given the context
| of the pork rule, being surrounded by hundreds of
| completely wacky rules, it seems most likely to me that
| the pork rule was completely arbitrary and turned out to
| be "correct" by accident.
| graemep wrote:
| That explains why such rules are beneficial, but does not
| explain how such rules should come about.
|
| They date back thousands of years when no one knew the
| mechanisms so its not deliberate. It could be evolution
| of cultures - in that groups that followed certain rules
| survived better.
|
| The first problem I see with that is that the two main
| religions that ban pork also have a lot of other rules
| about food, dress and grooming, sexual behaviour, and
| lots of other things. SOme of them (hygiene rules, for
| example) are beneficial, but how do you explain the rest.
| SOme might have less obvious benefits in the context of
| the society they originated in - but all?
|
| The other is that you do not need rules to be religious.
| Social norms are just as powerful. The persistence of
| circumcision in the US illustrates this. It is still
| common (usual?) despite the largest religion not only not
| requiring, but its scriptures specifically state it is
| not a religious requirement (and dispenses with the
| entire set of detailed rules - retaining only some more
| general ones).
| kragen wrote:
| Horses and cows have much better-smelling poop than hogs
| do, and they generally won't eat human poop, rotting
| garbage, fallen soldiers on battlefields, or small
| children that happen to trip and fall. Hogs will eat all
| of these.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_toilet
|
| We don't really know the origin of the taboo, but there
| are more candidate explanations than just epidemiology.
| jjallen wrote:
| This is one of the most digusting things I've ever read
| about. Thank you.
| codr7 wrote:
| Except pigs have a lot more in common with humans than
| the others.
|
| Pigs are super intelligent, we have the same blood
| groups, organ compatibility, piglets smell like newborn
| babies, their skin is very similar to human skin.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Actually, there are a number of ways in which pigs and
| humans share physiology which makes us susceptible to
| shared disease vectors. Perhaps most obvious is our skin.
| Pigs and humans are the only land mammals who have what
| amounts to sea mammal skin, leathery and thick with fat
| deposits right at the dermis.
| hoseyor wrote:
| It's crazy to think that a religious dictate of Islam and
| Judaism may have its origins in not cooking meat thoroughly
| or good practices during dressing and butchering.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| Those religious dictates were well before germ theory.
| 34679 wrote:
| That's kind of the point.
|
| Man eats pork. Man gets sick. Man believes God made him
| sick for eating pork.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| Not really the point. The modern "practices during
| dressing and butchering" highlighted by the GGP were
| based on the understanding of the germ theory of disease.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Many religious dictates of the two religions with a
| standing religious law and polity had a usefulness in the
| past and a second, slightly different usefulness in the
| modern era of loneliness, alienation, lack of identity,
| etc.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Not at all.
|
| They had identified a global health issue and a potential
| source without necessarily knowing all the details. Banning
| pork seemed reasonnable if they couldn't make sure people
| don't get sick after eating it.
| usrusr wrote:
| What's crazy about that? Religion used to be long term
| knowledge encoding (multigenerational). Evolved knowledge,
| the group that stumbled into a pig taboo just happened to
| be more successful than the group without. In an area where
| pigs are better not eaten, either the former would
| eventually replace the latter or the advantageous knowledge
| spreads. I'd consider it crazy to think of (the roots of)
| religion to be anything else.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| > Evolved knowledge, the group that stumbled into a pig
| taboo just happened to be more successful than the group
| without
|
| This doesn't really track though. Because by this logic,
| polygamous religions would have overtaken monogamous
| ones. Or religions like Jainism and Buddhism would have
| not lasted as long as they did. Religions are not solely
| evolutionary, nor are the customs and traditions of
| cultures over time. They aren't genetic traits that
| evolutionary theory applies to them.
|
| Also consider, nothing about Judaism is disadvantageous
| by your logic but it has become a small minority religion
| largely as a result of persecution over the ages. There's
| not an evolutionary aspect there.
| usrusr wrote:
| > Because by this logic, polygamous religions would have
| overtaken monogamous ones
|
| Would they? Are societies where children are hardly more
| than a number to their fathers necessarily more
| successful, more stable?
|
| Unlike genetic traits, religions and other cultural
| traits are software, not hardware. (yes, genetic traits
| are information, but so is VHDL). Individuals can change
| their mind, adapt the ways of a different group, not
| possible with genes.
|
| You point out Judaism, that one's quite an outlier
| because it's so unaccepting of would be believers who
| weren't born into it. Turns out forks that do away with
| that part spread quite far.
| a3w wrote:
| Was the 'a zombie outbreak game making-of-video' placed in the
| middle of this article on purpose, or by automatic CMS?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Ars seems to have succumbed to this dumbass US trend of putting
| a random video 3 lines into any news article, since clearly 3
| lines is too much for today's attention spans.
|
| Edit: it may be a fallback for an ad, according to this forum
| thread? https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/ars-video-
| callisto-pro... Still stupid though - so the user is already
| costing you money by blocking ads, so how about we waste 10x
| the money in bandwidth serving up a pointless video?
| xorcist wrote:
| Ars is perfectly usable without Javascript. Either use Noscript
| or click the uBo shield and deselect the script tag.
| dharmab wrote:
| At this point I have uBo disable JS by default and bound a
| hotkey to turn it on as needed.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| How could he afford all this medical care?
| dharmab wrote:
| Presumably, by buying health insurance.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| The lifestyle description seems less affluent than Walter
| 'Heisenberg' White.
| dharmab wrote:
| ...I think you've misunderstood how health insurance works.
| sejje wrote:
| And perhaps television
| hoseyor wrote:
| My guess is being retired military.
| cowfarts wrote:
| If old - medicare
|
| If veteran [1] - VA
|
| If indigent - medicaid
|
| [1] not unlikely for a Florida man born in 1945
| reaperducer wrote:
| _How could he afford all this medical care?_
|
| Why does it matter? Why introduce a completely off topic
| question?
| inetknght wrote:
| This isn't such an off topic discussion -- dealing with
| health issues certainly does lead to discussing health
| insurance.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Article stated he's a pastor. It's likely the church where he
| preaches provides insurance.
| kragen wrote:
| The clickbait headline should be replaced by one that somewhere
| mentions the word "brucellosis", because that's what he had. We
| aren't talking about exotica like meningococcemia, ehrlichiosis,
| or meloidosis here.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| I feel like in the case of bacterial meningitis, they would
| have. Would you rather see, "Brucellosis hits goat farmer, but
| not from where you expect!"
| dbcooper wrote:
| The cattle all have brucellosis, We'll get through somehow
| pfdietz wrote:
| Thank you, Warren.
| wirrbel wrote:
| ah, thanks, that isn't extremely exotic.
| dillydogg wrote:
| There are between 100-200 cases of brucellosis in the US each
| year, so I would call that rare. It's common worldwide, but not
| where this patient lives. Also, the species of Brucella is a
| less common one in the US. Erlichiosis is closer to 1000 per
| year.
| donnachangstein wrote:
| A lot of things that are rare in the US, e.g. trichinosis,
| are still endemic in Europe. Something like > 50% of pigs in
| Eastern Europe are infected while there are < 20 human cases
| per year in the US because of better agricultural standards.
| Part of the reason you can eat a medium rare pork chop in the
| US and not die. I love bacon.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| 2021 data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention
| and Control:
|
| Bulgaria and Croatia had the highest rates of
| trichinellosis at 0.42 cases per 100,000 population,
| accounting for 58% of all cases reported in 2021. Taking
| those two countries gether and extrapolateing to whole US
| population of 3400 hundred thousand (340 million) would be
| 1428 cases - definitely much higher that <20, which would
| be something like 0.0002 per 100,000.
|
| The total number of reported infections in 2021 was 79
| cases for the whole European Union / European Economic Area
| was 79 cases for a total population of 4500 hundred
| thousand (450 million), an infection rate of 0.02 cases per
| 100,000.
|
| Discounting the two worst countries would reduce the number
| to about 40 cases per 4500 hundred thousand population
| would bring the rate of infection to something like 0.008 -
| not entirely too far from the US.
|
| https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/AE
| R...
| kragen wrote:
| It's kind of rare, just not in the way I was hoping for when
| the headline tricked me into clicking it.
| MillironX wrote:
| Maybe semantics, but _Brucella suis_ isn 't a "rare
| bacteria," it's a rare cause of a rare (human) disease in the
| US. _B. suis_ is endemic in feral pig populations.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| The headline would be far less meaningful for most people if it
| said that. The vast majority of people would have no idea what
| "brucellosis" even is.
| kragen wrote:
| You generally don't make utterances _less_ understandable by
| _adding_ words.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| It was definitely not clear to me that you just wanted to
| add words. I took you as meaning that you wanted the
| headline to be "Feral pig must transmits brucellosis",
| which would be significantly less clear.
| larusso wrote:
| It's somewhat scary that it still can take years to find the
| route cause for these kinds of infections. Two years back I had a
| month stretch in stomach pains. The worst I ever had. I had this
| on and off for 2-4 years. Happened once a year and was gone. I
| went to multiple doctors and did bloodtests etc. I then had a
| Colonoscopy and Gastroscopy. They want some scared tissue in my
| duodenum. Reason was some bacteria or fungi which they where then
| able to test for. Wich is funny because they did all kinds of
| bloodtests before ... Long story short, I received a special
| antibiotic and everything was fine. My theory was that I eat
| something problematic while being in Egypt around 2018.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| Which antibiotic did they give you?
| larusso wrote:
| Uff sorry would need to check. It's been a few years already
| since I got the treatment.
| cpgxiii wrote:
| It could have been Rifaximin (brand name Xifaxan), which is a
| somewhat standard "special" antibiotic for gut issues.
| petre wrote:
| I read about a guy getting _iraquibacter_ from desert dust in
| Egypt and getting treated with phage therapy by his wife.
| Needless to say I 'll avoid Egypt.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/08/health/phage-superbug-killer-...
| skellera wrote:
| That's an amazing story. The wife really gathered together
| all the right people to create a phage treatment to save her
| husband's life. Great job on all the doctors and scientists
| that figured out how to make it so quickly.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| To my intense interest recently, I learned that the word
| _sarcophagus_ literally means "eater of flesh" and indeed
| has Eucharistic connotation, but of course most commonly
| applied to Pharaonic caskets.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Sometimes it's "just" _helicobacter pylori_.
|
| I had a particularly widespread infection a while ago, so my GP
| prescribed Amoxicillin.
|
| Suddenly the stomach pains, which used to be a regular thing
| for me whenever I ate something hard to digest, disappeared
| altogether.
|
| Turns out this antibiotic is part of the concoction they have
| you take to deal with stomach ulcers, as it deals with the
| bacteria responsible for them.
|
| I have no confirmation that was indeed the case here aside from
| a previously diagnosed chronic doudendum inflammation, but the
| difference was night and day, so this is my working theory.
| petre wrote:
| You also need a proton pump inhibitor taken one hour before
| the antibiotic and before food for a more effective
| treatment.
|
| The chronic duodenum inflamation could also be linked to gut
| microbiota depletion. I had mild lactose intolerance for
| years until I took probiotics for a few months and started
| eating whole milk youghurt (as unfermented milk the question)
| as part of my regular diet. It needs to be real yoghurt, not
| the phony sweeter one with corn starch, sugar or fruit added
| to it. Also UHT milk might screw up your gut microbiota. Make
| sure you take probiotics during and after the antibiotic
| treatment.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Seconding this.
|
| I'm unsure of interactions between antibiotics and
| detrimental gut flora such as _Candida albicans_ , but
| Western medicine pretends that doesn't exist anyway
| mertleee wrote:
| After having a seemingly "random" bout of cdiff after receiving
| a highly potent antibiotic for a "random" salivary gland
| infection - colonoscopies and antibiotics really scare me.
|
| I believe the salivary gland infection was a result of some
| non-covid illness I had that may have been linked to some odd
| vaccine side effect or my tanked immune system.
|
| Gut stuff is so important.
| taosx wrote:
| I ate a lot of such boar meat last year in Greece, it instantly
| became my favorite due to the hardness and taste but based on
| this I may avoid it for the foreseeable future.
| hoseyor wrote:
| You have nothing to be concerned with if it is cooked
| thoroughly to safe temperatures. So anything that is slow
| cooked over time would be safe if cooked to 145deg for whole
| and 160deg for ground meat.
|
| The subject person may have undercooked it or likely even come
| in contact with it while dressing a hog, i.e., touching an eye,
| scratching the nose, or even touching something that later
| caused cross contamination.
| Loughla wrote:
| Every outbreak story that has ever been printed has that as a
| background fact. When eating meat, make sure it's cooked
| thoroughly. I love a good, high quality, rare steak when I
| know the origin of the animal. But literally everything else
| gets cooked very, very thoroughly.
| sim7c00 wrote:
| in a lot of places ppl will never ever touch rare meat. its
| disgusting to them, unsanitary. my wife loves sushi but
| refuses to eat rare fish. she says to her its like eating
| litteral sh/t. conditioning from where she was raised. (she
| eats the rice n cucumber rolls haha)
|
| we cook salmon so thoroughly it makes fried chicken look
| raw :'). God bless spices!
|
| Id never recommend eating raw meat. I worked at a
| distribution butchery for super markets in a country that
| arguably has one of the cleanest and strictest pipelines
| for such stuff and i'll tell u. its just people packing ur
| stuff.. its incredibly easy for a chain of events to happen
| to get properly sourced meat infected with pretty much
| anyhting. many opportunities along the route from slaughter
| to packaging etc.
|
| its not gross or badly managed, just how it is with humans
| handling things, heat needed during the process, many
| transports and different handoffs during production
| process.
|
| so yeah, cook it n cook it good is all i can say. dont
| trust some sticker on a package to tell u its safer than
| somethin else
| caseyohara wrote:
| "Rare" fish is always a bad idea, but perhaps you meant
| "raw", which is different.
|
| Raw fish like used in sushi/sashimi is generally safe
| because the fish is flash frozen, which is as effective
| as thorough cooking for killing parasites.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Flash freezing may kill multicellular parasites, but I
| don't believe it will kill bacteria.
| jnwatson wrote:
| Raw fish is flash frozen in the US. Not necessarily so in
| other countries. Be careful eating sushi outside the
| US/Japan.
| scheme271 wrote:
| Ahi/Tuna doesn't have to be flash frozen in the US.
| There's an FDA exception for it.
| geophile wrote:
| I (an American -- don't blame me, I voted for Harris)
| traveled to New Brunswick a few years ago. Went to a pub
| in St. Johns and ordered a burger, medium rare. The
| waitress informed me that they can't do that. By law, for
| public health reasons, ground meet served by restaurants
| must be cooked at a temperature that rules out even
| medium rare.
| lagniappe wrote:
| Please don't use HN for this type of remark, we're just
| nerds here.
| rsynnott wrote:
| That's the case in many countries. Rare ground beef is a
| very different proposition to a rare steak. The reason
| that a lump of rare beef is safe(ish) is that bacteria
| are not good at migrating into the muscle tissue; if
| there's something undesirable present it will likely be
| on the surface and is destroyed by cooking. But once you
| make ground beef, all bets are off; if there was, say, E.
| coli present on the surface, it's all over the place now.
| briandear wrote:
| Did Harris propose something relevant in Canadian meat
| cooking practices? I'm confused how who you voted for has
| any relevance to meat practices.
|
| More relevant, does that mean steak tartar is illegal in
| Canada? A person willing to buy uncooked ground beef is
| not allowed to buy it from someone willing to serve it?
|
| Interesting article:
| https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/medium-rare-burgers-
| are...
| roxolotl wrote:
| So I preface this by saying there's 0 evidence that chronic
| wasting disease can target humans.
|
| The one thing you can't kill by cooking are prions. I've
| had a good deal of venison from regions where chronic
| wasting disease is now prevalent and whenever I'm reminded
| of its existence I get a tiny bit of fear that it's just
| lurking waiting. All the prion death stories out there are
| horrifying and random.
| kubectl_h wrote:
| There are researchers out there investigating a potential
| link from CWD tainted meat consumption to CJD clusters.
| From what I've read it's a tenuous correlation at best. I
| really hope they don't find anything. If CWD jumps to
| either humans or cattle it's going to call for some
| really tough decisions on what to do with these deer
| populations.
| xeromal wrote:
| It'll have to be like the chicken flu cullings. Gonna be
| brutal. I think it spread to GA my home state finally
| even though I believe it originated in Colorado?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Why would the temperature differ for ground vs whole meat?
| Surely the same temperature would have the same ability to
| kill bacteria no matter the way the meat was processed.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Because there's lot of bad stuff that's external to the
| muscle that can wind up on the surface as a result of the
| butchering process. When you grind the meat you potentially
| mix that throughout so you gotta cook it throughout whereas
| a steak can be eaten raw-ish in the center.
|
| This is how ground beef e-coli outbreaks work. People don't
| cook their burgers through and get sick.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Slow cooking "as practiced" is a VERY safe cooking method for
| anything sus because people tend to go way hot for internal
| temp, like 180-205ish (freedom degrees obviously), in order
| to render the fat.
| jcd000 wrote:
| You are safe as long as pig meat is cooked well done, which we
| always do in Greece. But it pays to be aware and careful.
| atmosx wrote:
| The people of Epirus, Crete, and Central Greece, in
| particular, have perfected the art of cooking meats like lamb
| and boar.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Based on the article it seems the infection likely occurred
| while he was handling the raw meat. Wear gloves and wash your
| hands and surfaces well and take precautions to avoid cross-
| contaminating ingredients that won't be cooked to safe
| temperatures. Standard kitchen and food safety stuff.
|
| If you're not preparing it yourself, then it could be
| reasonable to avoid it if you're aren't confident in the
| preparation.
| gcheong wrote:
| In the article the person said they had been getting the feral
| hog meat from a hunter who had gifted him raw meat several
| times and that he handled it with his bare hands while
| preparing it and then cooking it an eating it. The doctors
| surmised it was most likely his handling it with bare hands
| that was the vector of transmission, not eating the cooked
| meat.
| taosx wrote:
| Thank you for all the assurances and suggestions for the
| future. The meat was cooked very well but the problem I think
| it's that me and my friends (hunters) were unaware of such a
| possibility.
|
| We were the ones that brought back, cleaned and prepared the
| boar with our bare hands with no precautions (we were in the
| mountains). The only thing that gives me a bit of piece of mind
| is that several months passed since then and we have no
| symptoms and I know many other people that have eaten wild boar
| from that area that have no symptoms.
| throwanem wrote:
| I knew this man the instant they said he's in his seventies and
| still taking boar. Who knew Uncle Bram was still kickin' around
| after all these years?
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| This should help everyone understand a little better the
| _origins_ - or perhaps wisdoms - _of the pork taboo_ which was
| discussed here recently [0]:
|
| Pigs are simply a potpourri of all sorts of bacteria that you
| don't want in you.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410885
| swampthing wrote:
| That's not at all the conclusion of the article you linked to.
| In fact, that theory is discounted by it.
|
| > Price points out, however, that none of these theories fully
| accounts for the taboo. Pig-rearing, after all, had existed for
| thousands of years in the region, even in times of drought, and
| many types of meat can harbor the larvae that cause
| trichinosis.
|
| > For Price, the key piece of evidence is the sole reason given
| for the taboo in the biblical text--the fact that the pig "has
| hooves and does not chew its cud." In other words, it's unlike
| ruminants. He argues that this harks back to an era when the
| Israelites were simple pastoralists. As their descendants
| settled down in towns and cities, raising pigs became a more
| viable option. "This detracted from the fantasy of living like
| their ancestors," says Price, prompting Judean priests to ban
| eating pork.
|
| > Rosenblum argues that the pig taboo only gained special
| status with the invasion of the Levant by the forces of the
| Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. These European
| conquerors enjoyed their pork, and pig consumption in the
| Levant soared. So did tensions between Judeans and their
| Hellenistic rulers, including the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt and
| the leaders of the Seleucid Empire based in today's Iraq.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _Though he couldn't recall the specific hunter who gave him the
| biohazardous bounty, he remembered handling the raw meat and
| blood with his bare hands--a clear transmission risk--before
| cooking and eating it._
|
| Well, of course he could perfectly recall, but he's not going to
| rat out his friend.
| rvba wrote:
| > an extremely infectious bacteria
|
| > In the US, there are only about 80 to 140 brucellosis cases
| reported each year, and they're mostly caused by B. melitensis
| and B. abortus
|
| The article doesnt seem to be consistent...
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