Outbreak News Today reports that Russian officials report last week that 10 people from Altai Republic, near the Mongolian border, were hospitalized with trichinosis after consuming undercooked bear cub.
The regional office of Rospotrebnadzor said, “Not all bears, of course, are infected wi. But this sometimes happens, there were simply no such massive cases. We are in control of the situation.”
Earlier, Russians were advised to avoid contact with raw meat and animal blood in Altai, so as not to get infected with bubonic plague. As the infectious disease doctor Ivan Konovalov stated , outbreaks of the plague periodically occur in Russia, where the traditions of local peoples include eating raw animal meat. He emphasized that there is a vaccine against the plague pathogen.
Trichinosis is a parasitic disease caused most commonly by the roundworm Trichinella spiralis. If someone ingests undercooked or raw meat with the encysted larvae, the stomach acid releases the larvae which mature to adults in the intestine.
After about a week the female starts releasing larvae which enter the bloodstream and find their way to skeletal muscle where they encapsulate.
There can be gastrointestinal symptoms mimicking acute food poisoning when there is activity of the adults in the intestine.
50-years-ago there was a Dairy Queen on the main strip where I grew up.
According to my mother, who just e-mailed me (Happy Mother’s Day, mom, you’re the best, that’s her, right, with great-grandson Emerson) it’s still there.
At least one of my Canadian daughters worked at a DQ, but I thought they disappeared decades ago (the DQs, not the daughters).
Dairy Queen stated the store was immediately sanitized and disinfected, and that all employees will be vaccinated before returning to work if they have not already done so.
News of the outing emerged earlier this year after Discovery Wildlife Park, located about 70 miles north of Calgary in the town of Innisfail, posted a video on social media showing a captive Kodiak bear sitting in the passenger seat of a truck.
The video later showed the one-year-old bear, known as Berkley, leaning out of the truck’s window, enthusiastically licking an ice cream cone held by the owner of a local Dairy Queen.
Amid widespread criticism, the video – along with a second one showing Berkley licking frosting off an ice cream cake – was taken down.
At the time, the zoo said the drive-thru run had posed no danger to the public, as it had taken place before the Dairy Queen had opened for the day and that the bear had been secured by a chain throughout the entire outing.
Wildlife officials in Alberta said that the zoo and its owners are now facing two charges. “Under the terms and conditions of the zoo’s permit, the charges are directly related to the alleged failure of the park to notify the provincial government prior to the bear leaving the zoo,” Alberta Fish and Wildlife said in a statement.
One count stems from the bear’s jaunt through the drive-thru, while the other dates back to 2017. At the time Berkley had just arrived as an orphan from a facility in the United States and the zoo allegedly failed to inform officials the seven-pound bear was being taken home nightly so that she could be bottle-fed.
The zoo’s owner, Doug Bos, said he planned to plead guilty to the charges, noting that this was the first time in the zoo’s 28-year history that it was facing such charges.
“We made a mistake. I’m embarrassed about it,” he told the Guardian. “Every time we take an animal off the property, we’re supposed to notify Fish and Wildlife, send them an email, and we forgot to do that in both instances.”
He said he had been happy to hear of the charges. “I’m glad that they followed through with it because it shows how strictly regulated the zoo industry is in the province,” he said. “Because there are so many people out there that think it’s not, they think anybody can just do anything they want.”
Bos said that wildlife officials had not necessarily taken issue with the bear’s outing to Dairy Queen but rather the zoo’s failure to request permission beforehand. “That’s all we did wrong,” he added, noting that the bears have been taken off the property many times for a range of reasons.
“We’ve done lots of TV commercials, Super Bowl commercials with bears and food … Some of them the bear was in a grocery store and wandered up and down the aisles.”
He emphasised the difference between bears in the wild and the zoo’s bears, describing those in the facility as hand-raised and well-trained.
At one point the zoo’s bears had even learned to pee in a cup, he said, in order to participate in a Scottish veterinarian’s study aimed at measuring baseline norms for bears. “These bears aren’t just your average bear that we go snag out of the wild and do this.”
The regional office of Rospotrebnadzor said, “Not all bears, of course, are infected wi. But this sometimes happens, there were simply no such massive cases. We are in control of the situation.”
