I've got to say it. Pigs are a mixed bag for me. They are an essential ingredient in loads of foods that I thoroughly enjoy (pork chops, bacon, sausage, scrapple), but then again, ham and I are not friends. Some pigs will help you find truffles, but most would happily munch on your corpse. You see what I'm getting at here? Alright, fair enough, I may have watched too much Deadwood (if that's possible), but those pigs can be killers, and that's without hunting them wild with only a spear in your hand. Of course we all know the dangers of trichinosis (you didn't see that turn coming, did you?).
Trichinosis is a parasitic disease, most famously acquired from the ingestion of raw or undercooked pork, bearing trichina worm larvae (though bears, lions, walruses, and other large carnivores can also carry it). Yeah, it's tough to be a fan of something that may be carrying parasitic worms. So, the deal is, the encysted worms hatch and mate in your intestines where the females then burrow into the intestinal wall to produce their little ones. This might not make your tummy feel good. The newly birthed larvae move through the bloodstream, most often ending up in the tongue, behind the eyes, or between the ribs. They can give you lots of pain, seizures, abnormal heart rhythm, and loads of other symptoms, depending on where they decide to hang out, but they're rarely fatal (yay). Symptoms should go away in about three months, though pain may persist.
Happily there are few things we can do to keep the wee beasties from feasting on us (which is always a creepy thought). The one we all grew up with is cooking our pork thoroughly (the wiki page has a table if you want to get technical), though curing, drying, and smoking the meat may not work. Interestingly, there is another way to protect yourself. Don't eat pork in Europe. Well, that may be a bit drastic, but apparently the USFDA has gotten something right in how we handle our swine. Making sure that all of the meat fed to pigs is cooked and keeping the rats out of their pens (where they might be eaten), has reduced US incidence of trichinosis to almost nil.
So, what does all of this have to do with a Fantasy world? Well, I've heard about trichinosis all my life, but never really looked into it before. It's sort of a bugaboo that makes you wonder why we've bothered with the little oinkers for so long (though bacon is a reasonable answer). However, when you go back to the Middle Ages, the likelihood of your little porkers getting much meat to nosh on is almost zero. If they had known how it was contracted, they might worry about infected rats, but you've already cut down the chances of contracting the parasites significantly by taking the meat away. It'd be more of a danger if you grazed your pigs wild, since they could get into all kinds of things in the fields and forests. All in all, you could put some folks wisdom into your world about cooking piggies through, or have an epidemic every now and again with the appropriate symptoms, but you probably wouldn't be far wrong if you just ignored it altogether.
wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichinosis
details - http://web.stanford.edu/class/humbio103/ParaSites2005/Trichinella/trich.html
medical advice - http://www.merckmanuals.com/home/infections/parasitic_infections/trichinosis.html
the biggie - http://www.trichinella.org/
No comments:
Post a Comment