wolit@rabbit.UUCP (Jan Wolitzky) (05/17/84)
I'm glad that this often-neglected subject is getting an airing here. I'd like to help by tossing in my two cents. There's been some confusion about what constitutes a parasite. Salmonella, along with botulinum, are bacteria, not parasites. Parasites, strictly speaking, don't cause food poisoning, they cause damage either by sponging more off you than you can afford to share with them, or by getting in where they shouldn't be, in the case of parasites that weren't designed for you in the first place. Examples of the former include infestations of large numbers of almost any parasite, or of certain particularly nasty ones, such as the fish tapeworm, Diphyllobothrium latum. This causes a vitamin deficiency (I forget exactly which one -- don't ask me how I manage to remember "Diphyllobothrium" and forget a single letter near the start of the alphabet!), and is sometimes called the "Jewish grandmother tapeworm," as it infects one of the fish used in making Gefilte fish, which is often tasted (for seasoning) before cooking, and thus is common among older Jewish women. (Younger ones get it from sushi, I'll bet.) Minor infections of the common beef or pork tapeworms, Taenia saginata or Taenia soliens (sp?), are less serious, as these guys simply hang out in your gut and eat whatever you do. In fact, it was not that long ago that apothecaries sold tapeworm scoleces (heads) as a means of weight control. The trick is to avoid internal overpopulation caused by reinfecting yourself. These worms live in your large intestine and the eggs they shed pass out in your stool, so good sanitation is important. The roundworm responsible for trichinosis is nastier, as its usual host is not humans (nor pigs), but, I believe, some invertebrate (snail, maybe?). When it gets into you, it gets lost and wanders around until you form a cyst around it. Too many cysts in your muscles can be pretty painful. Trichina infections in pigs could be eliminated if pig farmers would stop feeding pig scraps to their pigs, but a buck is a buck, so they keep the practice going. Don't change fish stores just because you find a few worms crawling around. In my college Parasitology course, we got our lab supplies from randomly-chosen markets, road kills, etc. Virtually EVERY animal on earth has parasites - don't look too closely at your food (or yourself) if you don't want to know. Jan Wolitzky, AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ