Eating sushi can be risky

I dry heaved when I read this…..

Michelle Robertson of SF Gate reports

A Fresno man with a daily sushi habit had a 5.5-foot tapeworm lodged in his intestines. He pulled it out himself, wrapped it around a cardboard toilet paper tube and carried the creature into Fresno’s Community Regional Medical Center.
Kenny Bahn was the lucky doc on shift at the time. He recounted his experience on a recent episode of the podcast “This Won’t Hurt A Bit.”
Bahn said the patient complained of “bloody diarrhea” and expressed a desire to get treated for tapeworms.
“I get asked this a lot,” the doctor said. “Truthfully, a lot of times I don’t think they have it.”
This man had it, which he proved to Bahn by opening a plastic grocery bag and pulling out the worm-wrapped toilet paper tube.
Bahn then asked some questions, starting with: “That came out of your bottom?”
“Yes.” 
According to the doctor’s retelling, the patient was using the restroom when he noticed what looked like a piece of intestine hanging out of his body.
Doctors in Taiwan extracted an 8-and-a-half foot tapeworm from a girl’s intestine and believe she contracted the parasite through raw, contaminated fish.
“He grabs it, and he pulls on it, and it keeps coming out,” Bahn recounted. He then picks the thing up, “looks at it, and what does it do? It starts moving.” (Note: At this point in the podcast, the hosts audibly gasp.)
That’s when the man realized he had a tapeworm stuck in his insides. He headed to the emergency room shortly thereafter, where Bahn treated him with an anthelmintic, a single-treatment deworming medication used on humans and dogs alike.
Bahn also took it upon himself to measure the specimen on the floor of the hospital. It stretched a whopping 5 feet, 6 inches — “my height,” noted the doctor.
Tapeworms can be contracted in a variety of ways, but Bahn said his patient hadn’t traveled out of the country or engaged in any out-of-the-ordinary behavior. The man also professed his love of sushi, specifically raw salmon sashimi, which he confessed to eating daily.
Fresno is located an ample 150 miles from coastline and is not exactly famed for its sushi. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned last February that the rise in popularity of raw fish consumption has likely spurred a recent increase of tapeworm infections.

 

Chicken sashimi is risky; and gross

A year ago I was in Japan for a few days and my hosts took me for sashimi every night. I think they thought it was funny taking a food safety nerd for a bunch of raw seafood. I did my best to be polite and steered towards more cooked foods. And lots of rice.

Earlier today Sara Miller at Live Science and I exchanged emails about chicken sashimi, a food that has been popular on twitter over the past couple of days. The same food that was linked to 800+ illnesses in the spring of 2016. Even Japanese public health folks were urging against eating it.

It’s not uncommon to find raw foods on a restaurant menu — think sushi or steak tartare — but if you see uncooked poultry as an option the next time you’re dining out, you may want to opt for something else.

Several restaurants in the United States are serving up a raw chicken dish that’s referred to as either chicken sashimi or chicken tartare, according to Food & Wine Magazine. Though the “specialty” hasn’t caught on much in the U.S., it’s more widely available in Japan.

Eating chicken sashimi puts a person at a “pretty high risk” of getting an infection caused by Campylobacter or Salmonella, two types of bacteria that cause food poisoning, said Ben Chapman, a food safety specialist and an associate professor at North Carolina State University.

Chapman noted that eating raw chicken is different from eating raw fish, which can be found in sushi dishes. With raw fish, the germs that are most likely to make a person sick are parasites, and these parasites can be killed by freezing the fish, he said. Salmonella, on the other hand, “isn’t going to be affected by freezing.”

Chicken sashimi is sometimes prepared by boiling or searing the chicken for no more than 10 seconds, according to Food & Wine Magazine.

But these preparations probably only kill off the germs on the surface of the chicken, Chapman said. “But even that I’m not sure about,” he added. In addition, when a chicken is deboned, other germs can get into the inside of the chicken, he said.