It’s Enough to Put You Off Eating Fish

I typically don’t just repost a link to a news article but this is one of those times when I thought I would.

I don’t get to eat fish that often. Nobody else at my house eats fish. But on that occasion about once a month or so that I do get to eat fish I do enjoy it.

But I am probably going to be thinking twice about it now after reading this article.

The idea of a tiny worms between about 1cm and 2.5cm long with razor sharp teeth that can eat their way around my body to anywhere they like, including into my brain, is going to seriously spoil my enjoyment of fish.

It seems a wife and husband ingested the worms, called gnathostomiasis worms, when eating fish that they caught in the Calder River, north of Derby in Western Australia, on a camping holiday.

While the gnathostomiasis worms are known about, including that it is a really bad idea to ingest them, all previous cases in Australia were able to be linked back to ingesting fish from overseas (mainly India, Thailand, and Japan). This recent case from Western Australia is the first confirmed case where the worms were ingested eating fish from our waters.

The problem is that fish which is only ‘just’ cooked can still contain live worms. The way to ensure any worms in the fish are dead is to cook the fish to well-done so it reaches at least 85 degrees centigrade right through for at least five minutes. Nobody I know cooks their fish this ‘well-done’. Most people like their fish only just cooked right through.

Doing a bit of research on this worm I found that it can be ingested by eating infected fish, poultry, or frogs.

It just goes to prove that eventually nature finds a way to spoil everything.