United States: In the latest finding it is discovered that, when during the summer of 2022, a family sat down in South Dakota for a reunion feast that included barbeque borne on sticks, kabobs of black bear meat that one of the family members had ‘hunted’ to the point of killing the bear in northern Saskatchewan, Canada that May.
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Since the family did not own a meat thermometer they had to estimate the doneness as per the color of the dark meat. To begin with, it was accidentally served rare, to which a few family members noticed to recook it, as arstechnica.com reported.
However, within days of its occurrence, members of the family start getting sick. One, a 29-year-old man from Minnesota, presented with a multimorphic disease characterized by fever, muscle pains, periorbital edema, eosinophilia, and other laboratory abnormalities that are typical for parasitic infections.
The man received health services four times and was admitted into hospital two times within 17 days in July. This is not revealed until his second admittance to the hospital, where they discovered the bear meat, and only then everything came into place.
Discovery of the infection from raw bear meat
The doctors suspected the man who developed a condition called trichinellosis and infection of Trichinella nematodes (roundworms).
These dangerous parasites can be seen in different parts of the world, living in the muscle tissues of different sorts of carnivores and omnivores, as it was mentioned in the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as arstechnica.com reported.
However, it is rare to find them in humans of those living in North America. Although, over the past seven years, from 2016 to the first half of 2022, there were only seven reported outbreaks of trichinellosis in the United States comprising only 35 confirmed cases. Most of them have been associated with consumption of bear meat but moose and wild boar meat is also frequently used.
More about the rare infection
After the consumption of larvae present in the meat, these larvae emerge and start parasitizing on small intestines, which leads to painful abdomen, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, etc.
The infected mammal then becomes the host full of adult worms, which mate and lay more larvae in the gut space. The second generation of worms, therefore, migrate through the lymphatics and into the bloodstream, and throughout the entire body (the systemic phase).
The larvae can get dispersed all over the body’s tissues and can affect such significant organs as skeletal muscles, heart, and brain – the organ most abundant with oxygen.
The systemic phase has features such as fever, periorbital edema, muscle aches, inflammation of the heart muscle, and inflammation of the brain.