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Comment by taosx | Hacker News Reader

I ate a lot of such boar meat last year in Greece, it instantly became my favorite due to the hardness and taste but based on this I may avoid it for the foreseeable future.

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You have nothing to be concerned with if it is cooked thoroughly to safe temperatures. So anything that is slow cooked over time would be safe if cooked to 145° for whole and 160° for ground meat.

The subject person may have undercooked it or likely even come in contact with it while dressing a hog, i.e., touching an eye, scratching the nose, or even touching something that later caused cross contamination.

Every outbreak story that has ever been printed has that as a background fact. When eating meat, make sure it's cooked thoroughly. I love a good, high quality, rare steak when I know the origin of the animal. But literally everything else gets cooked very, very thoroughly.

in a lot of places ppl will never ever touch rare meat. its disgusting to them, unsanitary. my wife loves sushi but refuses to eat rare fish. she says to her its like eating litteral sh/t. conditioning from where she was raised. (she eats the rice n cucumber rolls haha)

we cook salmon so thoroughly it makes fried chicken look raw :'). God bless spices!

Id never recommend eating raw meat. I worked at a distribution butchery for super markets in a country that arguably has one of the cleanest and strictest pipelines for such stuff and i'll tell u. its just people packing ur stuff.. its incredibly easy for a chain of events to happen to get properly sourced meat infected with pretty much anyhting. many opportunities along the route from slaughter to packaging etc.

its not gross or badly managed, just how it is with humans handling things, heat needed during the process, many transports and different handoffs during production process.

so yeah, cook it n cook it good is all i can say. dont trust some sticker on a package to tell u its safer than somethin else

“Rare” fish is always a bad idea, but perhaps you meant “raw”, which is different.

Raw fish like used in sushi/sashimi is generally safe because the fish is flash frozen, which is as effective as thorough cooking for killing parasites.

Flash freezing may kill multicellular parasites, but I don't believe it will kill bacteria.

Raw fish is flash frozen in the US. Not necessarily so in other countries. Be careful eating sushi outside the US/Japan.

Ahi/Tuna doesn't have to be flash frozen in the US. There's an FDA exception for it.

I (an American -- don't blame me, I voted for Harris) traveled to New Brunswick a few years ago. Went to a pub in St. Johns and ordered a burger, medium rare. The waitress informed me that they can't do that. By law, for public health reasons, ground meet served by restaurants must be cooked at a temperature that rules out even medium rare.

Please don't use HN for this type of remark, we're just nerds here.

That’s the case in many countries. Rare ground beef is a very different proposition to a rare steak. The reason that a lump of rare beef is safe(ish) is that bacteria are not good at migrating into the muscle tissue; if there’s something undesirable present it will likely be on the surface and is destroyed by cooking. But once you make ground beef, all bets are off; if there was, say, E. coli present on the surface, it’s all over the place now.

Did Harris propose something relevant in Canadian meat cooking practices? I’m confused how who you voted for has any relevance to meat practices.

More relevant, does that mean steak tartar is illegal in Canada? A person willing to buy uncooked ground beef is not allowed to buy it from someone willing to serve it?

Interesting article: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/medium-rare-burgers-are...

So I preface this by saying there’s 0 evidence that chronic wasting disease can target humans.

The one thing you can’t kill by cooking are prions. I’ve had a good deal of venison from regions where chronic wasting disease is now prevalent and whenever I’m reminded of its existence I get a tiny bit of fear that it’s just lurking waiting. All the prion death stories out there are horrifying and random.

There are researchers out there investigating a potential link from CWD tainted meat consumption to CJD clusters. From what I've read it's a tenuous correlation at best. I really hope they don't find anything. If CWD jumps to either humans or cattle it's going to call for some really tough decisions on what to do with these deer populations.

It'll have to be like the chicken flu cullings. Gonna be brutal. I think it spread to GA my home state finally even though I believe it originated in Colorado?

> Every outbreak story that has ever been printed has that as a background fact

That's definitely not the case, some people eat raw meat too [0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/15/teenage-boy-di...

Why would the temperature differ for ground vs whole meat? Surely the same temperature would have the same ability to kill bacteria no matter the way the meat was processed.

Because there's lot of bad stuff that's external to the muscle that can wind up on the surface as a result of the butchering process. When you grind the meat you potentially mix that throughout so you gotta cook it throughout whereas a steak can be eaten raw-ish in the center.

This is how ground beef e-coli outbreaks work. People don't cook their burgers through and get sick.

Slow cooking "as practiced" is a VERY safe cooking method for anything sus because people tend to go way hot for internal temp, like 180-205ish (freedom degrees obviously), in order to render the fat.

Based on the article it seems the infection likely occurred while he was handling the raw meat. Wear gloves and wash your hands and surfaces well and take precautions to avoid cross-contaminating ingredients that won’t be cooked to safe temperatures. Standard kitchen and food safety stuff.

If you’re not preparing it yourself, then it could be reasonable to avoid it if you’re aren’t confident in the preparation.

Was thinking the same thing as well. I've hunted in this region a long time ago (on a private hunting club in Ocala) with an old friend from uni who explicitly advised that wearing gloves while handling wild hog was an absolute safety must because of infection risk.

In the article the person said they had been getting the feral hog meat from a hunter who had gifted him raw meat several times and that he handled it with his bare hands while preparing it and then cooking it an eating it. The doctors surmised it was most likely his handling it with bare hands that was the vector of transmission, not eating the cooked meat.

You are safe as long as pig meat is cooked well done, which we always do in Greece. But it pays to be aware and careful.

The people of Epirus, Crete, and Central Greece, in particular, have perfected the art of cooking meats like lamb and boar.

Thank you for all the assurances and suggestions for the future. The meat was cooked very well but the problem I think it's that me and my friends (hunters) were unaware of such a possibility.

We were the ones that brought back, cleaned and prepared the boar with our bare hands with no precautions (we were in the mountains). The only thing that gives me a bit of piece of mind is that several months passed since then and we have no symptoms and I know many other people that have eaten wild boar from that area that have no symptoms.

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