Parasites In Your Meat? The Real Risks Of Undercooked Meat In Good Times Or If The SHTF

Right now, most people’s meat comes to them after being raised with some care, handled in facilities regularly hosed down with antiseptics, inspected by people who care about their company’s reputation and occasionally government inspectors, and shipped in cold storage … and still 1 in 6 Americans get food poisoning each year.   Many of those cases are from bacteria on vegetables or fruit, but meat is also a rich source. 

Translate that into the kinds of conditions that may apply in an emergency situation – field dressed wild-caught game, no refrigeration, makeshift cooking arrangements (or maybe even no cooking arrangements at all), and the picture is not pretty.  What kinds of threats are there, and what can be done to mitigate them?  In this podcast, Salty and I talk it over.  

Germs are everywhere, but are killed by heat.

Most well known are the bacteria, such as E. coli on beef and Salmonella with chicken.  Bacteria are pretty much everywhere in the natural world, and both dirt and fecal material teems with them.  Getting tiny traces on meat is almost unavoidable — any knife slicing from surface inward will carry some with it. 

Will tiny traces make one sick?  Usually not.  However, it can take only twenty minutes at a favorable temperature to make one bacterium two; another twenty minutes and you’ve got four … do the math and it gets to mind-boggling numbers pretty fast.  That’s why we refrigerate.  Your first defense is to keep meat fresh, and to hold off cutting it up until you must (as every cut and touch may introduce more bacteria). (It is best to field-dress game as soon as possible however.  Field-dressing removes the intestines, which are filled with literally pounds of microbes.  Removing those slows the invasion of the edible parts from within.)

The good news on these germs is that they die in the heat.  This is the prime reason why we cook meat.  140 or 145 F is the recommendation for meat, depending on who you listen to.  That looks like medium rare in a steak or roast.  Sure, a lot of people eat rare steaks without getting sick; but that’s in part because of the relatively sanitary meat handling we currently enjoy, and in part because the outside of the cut of meat gets hottest and that’s where the microbes generally are unless the meat’s been left sitting too long.

Keep meat cool and/or uncut to reduce microbe growth. Thanks Jo Anna Barber* for the image.

Parasitic worms are a particular problem in fish, pork, and bear.

Taking a parasitology class will do a lot to ruin one’s enthusiasm for sushi.  So will discovering worm cysts in the meat of your wild-caught fish, as I’ve done many times.  Although it might happen with other species, the worms that can infest fish, pork, and bear meat are particularly likely to infest a human if the meat is eaten raw.  Theory assures me that cooking the meat thoroughly renders it safe, but I’ve never been that interested in trying it out. 

While it’s not completely reliable, visible inspection of the meat will often reveal the worm cysts.  The ones I’ve seen look like little oval or round nodules. No matter how hungry, I don’t think I’d ever eat meat raw or undercooked that had such cysts.  The long term consequences are worse than short term hunger unless dying is literally a real possibility without the food.  I’m told bear meat is a common source, and that that visual inspection of the meat isn’t as helpful as it was with my fish. (The person who shared this information with me has had muscle pain ever since his indiscretion on a hunting trip, by the way.  It’s very hard to clear these infections if they once take hold.)

Slide of raw meat with a worm cyst in it. Not a great lunch option. Thanks for the image, Microroa.

Prions aren’t destroyed by cooking and reside mostly in neural tissue.

You may have heard of prion diseases by such names as Mad Cow and Chronic Wasting Disease.  I did a full post on just these diseases: 

PrepperMed UPDATE: Evidence Shows Chronic Wasting Disease In Deer Transfers To Primates

In the short form:  Prions are misfolded proteins that cause additional proteins to misfold.  They aren’t alive, so can’t be killed.  Neither can they be deactivated by cooking or any chemical means that leaves the meat fit to eat.  The best strategy is avoidance; the alternative a long-term slide into a brain that looks like a sponge and thinks like one too.  The good news is that most of the prions are found in the brain and spinal cord.  To reduce risk, avoid cutting into either of these when butchering.

Your brain on a prion disease. Pro tip: It’s not supposed to be full of holes.

Toxins:  When the germs die but leave behind a parting ‘gift’

Does anybody not have a gut feeling that eating rotting meat is bad, even if you cook it thoroughly?  Well, why?  Germs are killed by careful cooking.  True.  But some microbes are masters of chemical warfare.  While alive, they produce toxins to poison their competition:  Deadly potent toxins, such as botulinum toxin.  Even when the microbes die, the toxins are still there.  Some of them, including botulinum toxin, is not sensitive to heat.  Therefore, if you have a thriving microbe population before the meat’s cooked, the toxins can still get you after cooking.  The best defense for this, as mentioned before, is not to let the meat sit in the warm to grow the microbes in the first place.

What if you can’t cook it?

Fresher is safer than less fresh.  Dressed early but sliced up later is safer than sliced up earlier or not field dressed.  Nasty, scraggly cud-chewers (including deer, elk, moose, cattle) are a bigger chronic wasting disease risk than healthier looking animals.  Fish and pork that has clean, uniform appearing flesh is safer than flesh with little nodules visible. Beef meat is safer than fish, pork, or bear meat.  Free ranged fowl are safer than confined fowl (due to Salmonella abundance in confinement flocks). Liver is always a bad choice uncooked; lots of species have liver flukes that like humans. None of these are guarantees.