The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 191: Sicker Than Hell

Episode Date: October 21, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with epidemiologist Timonthy Sly, Sam Lungren, and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: The meaning of the word "epidemiology"; tularemia and rabbits; ashing deer meat; on being trichinosis positive; cannibalism; what’s up with eating raw freshwater fish?; beaver fever; ribbony tape in your feces; putting money in your mouth; having a third ex-wife; the alimentary canal; just asking to be eaten; sucking discs; the various -osis things that can happen to you; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. Okay, Tim Sly, tell us what we're going to do. We're going to milk out the introduction. What is an epidemiologist? I mean, I mostly kind of know. But tell everybody. Tell Janice. Okay, the word doesn't have anything to do with illness. Epi means around.

Demos means people. And ology is the study of it. Somehow we've put diseases onto that. But it goes back to Aristotle. Actually, Hippocrates in the old days. Anything that was visited upon a population from outside, such as a plague or warts or something like that, was investigated. Warts are visited from the outside?

Well, sure they were. I mean, they didn't have warts yesterday. Now, today, everybody's got warts. I mean, I just keep using this example. So, diseases have taken over epidemiology, but the original word had nothing to do with diseases. Because they didn't know about them. They had some spectacular ideas about where

diseases came from. They were supernatural. The miasma. But the miasma was actually started by Hippocrates in a sort of a pretty reasonable way. Before that, it was the stars, demons, gods who were displeased with the evils of mankind, all kinds of devils and so on causing disease. There's still people who think that. For sure. But then Hippocrates came along and said, look, forget the supernatural. Think of natural.

So if you're living in a swampy area, you look at those people and they're going to have more chance of having fever than the people who live on a nice, clear mountaintop. He was right. But it wasn't the smell and the swamp that did it. It was the mosquitoes that lived in the swamp. So he had the right solution.

But at least he brought supernatural down to natural. But we had miasma lasting until really the mid-1800s until like Pasteur and Koch came along and found bacteria for the first time. So it's miasma, not miasma. You can pronounce it any way you like. But that concept was the idea that there was just bad air. Bad air. And of course we get bad air with malaria.

In Italian, mal aere, bad air. So we still use the word bad air in the name of malaria. Isn't it wild that they were, uh, pretty smart, just getting like wiped out by malaria, not making the connection between that mosquitoes for hundreds and hundreds of years. And they knew the connection between stagnant, stale collected water and disease, but he didn't know why. So they made the right solutions, but for the wrong reason.

Yeah. Well, tell me where, where, so you're an epidemiologist. You told us what it means. Where do you practice? What is your career? Virtually, anyway, my specialty is foodborne diseases but my colleagues are sometimes clinical epidemiologists and they help physicians in hospitals run randomized controlled trials. There's occupational health epidemiologists who are really trying to study diseases in the workplace because, remember, workers are exposed to 10, 100 times more problems than the citizens are.

So normally the diseases emerge more in a worker working in a mine, in a forest, in a slaughterhouse, wherever it is. They're exposed to much more chemical plants, pharmaceutical plants. It's the workers where diseases begin to show up first. So we study them. Why is that? Pardon the interruption.

Well, because they're exposed to more. If you're packing, I don't know, let's take Viagra in a pharmaceutical plant. You're breathing in this dust in an eight-hour shift every day for 30 years. You're exposed to far more of this incidental chemical than somebody who's in the citizenry. And we just buy one a couple, I'm using Viagra as a strange example, but you can see that they're exposed to far more. People working in the vinyl chloride industry, making polyvinyl chloride, PVC. Those people began to fall like flies for a very rare liver disease, hemangioma,

that only affects people who work in the PVC industry. Really? Yeah. Because it's a polymer, plastics are polymers, right? You get gases and liquids and you polymerize them together to make a solid. That's where polyvinyl chloride, vinyl chloride is a gas that's highly carcinogenic.

But the molecules together, you get polyvinyl chloride, which is pretty stable until you get incinerated at the end of its life. Then it produces furans and dioxins. So it's dangerous at the beginning when you're making it, dangerous at the end when you're burning it, but it's okay in the middle. So this is probably a misconception I had about, remember I told you I knew all about it and I was going to have you tell Yanis? I didn't know about it.

I had the misconception that I thought epidemiology, that you only looked at infectious diseases that spread from person to person? In the early days, Steve, you'd be right. People were worried about plague and they're worried about horrible disease like anthrax and typhoid and that. And it's still a major part of things. I mean, those diseases haven't gone away. They're still around. But more and more epidemiology looks at even accidents. You look at heart disease and cancers. Now, we have a few infectious cancers around. The first one was the feline leukemia virus, and that was a virus that can infect something, cause cancer. Human papillomavirus, which you know, you get your kids vaccinated for HPV and it's almost will wipe out future cervical cancer yeah that's the one it's like a

little bit controversial because people feel the little kids will get vaccinated and they'll be more likely to become like sexually promiscuous knowing that they don't yeah it's like this kind of like funny logic where there's a thing like you can get what's called HPV. So you could vaccinate your child for a... Is it a venereal disease? It's a virus. A virus.

It's spread through sexual contact. Yeah. But you've got to get the kids before the first contact with the virus, which means guaranteed before the first sexual contact. That's right. And some people argue like, oh, I don't want my kid to get it because then they'll be like that the only thing keeping their kid from being sexual is the fear of HPV apparently. And so then you give them-

It's pretty weak logic. Yeah. I just see this idea floating around out there. It always strikes me as funny. You specialize in foodborne. I've had a number of foodborne things that I'd like to talk about. How do you encapsulate what would be foodborne? Does it mean that you have to ingest it or is it exposure to like, like, is it exposure to the food system that you could get?

Or does it have to, does foodborne illness have to mean that you like, you physically ingested it in your mouth and swallowed it to be foodborne? Yeah, ingested. Food or water, yeah. Food or water that gets ingested. No, there are some diseases which you can, like, like tularemia, for example, you know, rabbit fever. That's where I was going with this. That one is mainly a food-borne disease, but you can also get it through cuts on the skin and through inhaling through an aerosol. That's a very versatile organism, but mainly it's a food-borne disease.

You're ingesting it, whether it's a toxin in the food, whether it's a bacteria, a parasite, a fungus, or a virus, or just a plain old chemical. They're all foodborne diseases. I want to walk through a whole bunch of diseases I'm interested in and that apply to sort of outdoor people. And I want to start with tularemia because there's a thing like, you guys can back me up on this. People sort of have this idea, people have this idea there's a thing like, you guys can back me up on this. People sort of have this idea. People have this idea. There's something wrong with rabbits,

right? But it's only wrong with rabbits before the first freeze of the year. And there's all sorts of old wives tales about it. Dude, I carried around with me. My kid killed a rabbit the other day with his little stick bow. And it's like, well,

he's walking around with it all. I mean, like, day with his little stick bow and it's like well he's walking around with it all i mean like like i would argue over handling it and it's summertime and i'm like you know i know from growing up that one doesn't handle a rabbit before the first frost and then i remember reading a couple years ago about a guy that ran over a uh like a desiccated rabbit with his lawnmower and got like an aerosolized tularemia no shit in his lungs yeah can you bastard yeah walk us through like what's wrong what's wrong with rabbits and when it's not just rabbits in fact if you track it right down to its origin, the reservoir, if you want to call it that, for disease in this case is the tick,

usually ticks. See, the ticks, rabbits happen to be close to the ground. The rabbits happen to pick up more ticks than most other animals out there. So they become infected with it. So that if you catch a rabbit, you skin a rabbit, you touch a rabbit, you run over it with a lawn mower or whatever, you're either going to have contact with the skin, you're going to breathe in the aerosol, or if you do cook it up and you have a rabbit pie, during the preparation of it, you can get bacteria, Francisella tolarensis, you're going to ingest it into your body and take it in the body in some way or another. If it's on the skin, you'll get like an ulcer, a rather nasty, an indurated ulcer. It's called an ulcerative type.

Does it have to enter through a cut? That's how it does. It's a very active little bacteria, Francisella, and it enters through a cut. And most people got little cuts on the skin that you don't notice about it. And so that's the skin form, which is easy to treat. Less easy to treat is the inhaled form.

So it forms a form of chronic pneumonia, quite nasty. And then if you eat the meat, you can get a gastrointestinal disease. It's a very versatile organism. You find it all over the place. But the tick is where you go first. Okay, walk me through the life cycle of a tularemia bacteria. So if you had a rabbit that lived in sort of an isolated, somehow you could isolate a rabbit from ticks. Right. So he's living a normal rabbit life, eating normal rabbit stuff.

But for whatever reason, this is some magical land where he doesn't come into contact with a tick. He never gets tularemia? If he's not bitten by a mosquito, because that's another way to transfer the organism, and he doesn't come across mice or rats, maybe field mice, deer mice or something like that, which can also carry it. And rabbits don't normally eat these things. So, yeah, you're right. If he doesn't get bitten by a tick or mosquito and doesn't get the contact, yes, he would be virtually free.

Can you get rabbit? Let's say you're hanging out. A mosquito bites a rabbit. And then the mosquito bites you. That doesn't transmit tularemia, right? Well, the mosquito would have to have bitten something first. Another infective rabbit or other animal to infect the rabbit. It doesn't come from just the mosquito or the tick.

I mean, it has to have bitten some other animal to transfer it. So the reservoir, the big reservoir, is the wildlife out there. Now, of course, if you get it, you're not going to transfer it to anybody else unless you give blood or unless somebody eats you. Cannibalism. That's very rare. But it is possible. Why is it known as rabbit fever?

I never heard of anybody. People don't exercise caution when they're cleaning squirrels out of fear of getting tularemia. Squirrels can get it too. So can the smaller rodents as well. Larger animals too. In fact, they've even found it in birds. Water birds. You know, cranes and things.

And I believe there's some people who say they found it in fish, too. There's an example of tularemia just in California a couple of years ago with a fish hook. Apparently, the fish hook was in a fish, and somebody then sort of tried to cast the hook again. It got caught in somebody's skin. Yeah. And that was the origin of the Francisella organism again. No.

Yeah. This is a very versatile. I think it was a fly tied out a rabbit hair. What do you think about that, Sam? Oh, I don't like thinking about that one bit. I tie with rabbit hair all the time. I will tan my own rabbit hides to make flies. Well, the hair is not going to be a problem.

No. Right. It's the flesh. It's the organism. Well, you got is not going to be a problem. No? No, it's the flesh. It's the organism. Well, you got to deal with the flesh. Never mind that theory. You got to deal with the flesh to get the hair out. Yeah.

If you're doing it yourself. Well, that's true, yeah. Does cooking rabbit meat kill tularemia? Yeah. Do you know what? Do you happen to know? I'll forgive you if you don't. At what temperature tularemia gets killed?

Oh, it's not very heat stable. So technically probably about 145 F, but I would take it up to about 160 to be on the safe side. Cause you can, I can't really be sure you're killing everything in there. 160. Yeah. A lot of magic, a lot of magic when it, when it comes to food, a lot of magic happens around 160. Yeah. You also lose a lot of magic out of some foods. If you're going to take it to 160. That's a given, that's a't we? Yeah, yeah. You also lose a lot of magic out of some foods if you're going to take it to 160. It's a give and take, right? Yeah, absolutely.

An elk steak taken to 160 is going to be like shoe leather. Well, yeah, you could try, you know what's coming in now is the sous vide method of cooking. Oh yeah, man. We're big fans. Down to about 140, 135, but for a long time. For a long period of time.

But that needs, that needs a microbiologist to begin to say, look it, you can cook with this thing. It needs, say, two and a half hours to kill the bacteria off. I mean, you know, I think you've had, have you? You've had trichinosis, haven't you? Me and Yanni here. Both of you have. We're positive. We even got t-shirts that say trich pos.

That may have been a great piece of semi-raw beef at that moment, but there's a problem with it. So they're taking up to their reasonable temperature or irradiating it or really freezing it. And freezing doesn't work all the time with trichinosis. We've got some new strains now in the Arctic area. That's what I wanted to ask. So we're jumping into trichinosis right now. We're just going for it. You're the boss. arctic area that's what i wanted to ask because so we're jumping into trichinosis right now we're just going we're going for it okay when we were struggling with with our little trichinosis

problem which really isn't that bad it's a bad week but it causes a lot of psychological harm because because you know you don't you don't have you can't like ask your buddy what happened to him when he had it so it it's unnerving but in in the end, in hindsight, it's not a big deal. However. It can be a big deal. It can kill you, right? It can kill you. But for most people, it's mild and achy and joint pain and so on.

But if it gets in the eye and the liver and the heart and stuff like that. Can be bad news. Can be bad. There was an outbreak in 2008 in California. An outbreak? Outbreak. Uh, 39 people met to sample bear meat. Sounds about right. Yeah.

And, uh, all of those are the epitome. So they had, they had a, they had a feast. No, they had a feast for bear meat. Okay. Go on. And there was, uh was some would only eat cooked bear meat, and the majority ate raw or semi-cooked.

And 100% of the people who ate the uncooked, the raw meat, developed trichinosis. Really? And the studies were fascinating. For example, there's not much meat left. How have I never even heard about this? You didn't? What year was this? I'll send you the reference the I'm not calling you out

like you're lying. You can read through the whole thing. Okay, go on. But they took all the meat they had left was some of the claw, the paw of the

bear. And for one gram of that meat they isolated 76 or 78 trichinosis worms. One gram. That's about the

size of a garbanzo, you know, a chickpea. Now, that's not the predilictive site for that particular organism. It really gets to the masseter muscles, you know,

the big chewing muscles, to the diaphragm and the heart. All those wandering parasites, that's where they go. So this is going to be much... Can I tell you, can I one-up you real quick?

What's that? I had to send a chunk of my bear meat down to the CDC in Atlanta. Yeah. It was, well, I remember I calculated it out to the pound. Yeah. It was 600,000 larvae per pound. That's about right, yeah.

Maybe I'm not one-upping you. Now, remember now, take it next step. All of those larvae are going to get into your gut, and your stomach acid is going to dissolve the little cyst that comes out. So now they're free swimming. The female is about two millimeters. The male is about one millimeter, very, very tiny. In your gut, they're mating. And each pair now produce thousands of larvae that are microscopic.

They enter through the gut wall, through the blood supply, and go around the body. So by that time, you've got billions of larvae in you now from the hundreds of thousands that you ate. We're talking astronomical numbers here. Do they? Is the heart, is your heart and diaphragm and tongue, did you say tongue

when you talked about hot spots? Tongue is one, especially for tapeworm. Okay, so it's not a trick hot spot. Not a trick hot spot,

no. Mass is this heart and diaphragm and tongue. Okay, is it that they, is it that it's a good habitat for them and they survive there, or do they know to go there? They don't know to go there.

So just the ones that go there do well. The circulation system runs into these tissues first. I mean, the heart muscle needs a lot of fresh oxygenated blood. So right from the lung, it gets into the heart, the heart wall. And so you're seeing a lot of endopathy. But I don't know why the mass of the muscle, why the chewing muscles would be. It is a case for quite a few parasites, wandering parasites.

Is that right? Yeah. You know where we felt the pain? Yeah. Back me up, Yanni, but you're, what am I touching right now? The scapula?

No, no, no. Shoulder blade? No, the muscle that connects your shoulders to your neck. Oh, the deltoid. Deltoid. Trapezius? Your traps. Yeah.

Don't nod, Yanni. People can't hear you nod. Yeah, I would agree with traps. Your calves. Yeah, the calves, yeah, yeah. And then lower back. Yeah. Right?

Yes. Would you back me up? That's where you could feel the pain. Really? But I don't know that that really means that that's where the bugs are going, the worms. Just the ones that are making their presence felt on you. Yeah, I see. Now, if we only had basically a shish kebab type chunk each, that's how much I had.

You might have had more. A couple shishes. So we might have not made it to hundreds of thousands because we ate very little that day. Just on the plane coming down to have their interest, I was looking at the range of meat, bear meat that was eaten by these 39 people. It ranged from about a half an ounce to one person at 28 ounces. That person really liked that raw bear. So if you figure it out to the next cycle of life,

they're into billions and billions of these things. Yeah, that guy was going for it. That's a big boy. And so what happens is it forms an inflammation, but instead of an inflammation being a little local inflammation, the entire body is one mass of inflammation. So your chemicals that respond to, you know, the cytokines respond to all the inflammation are just making you just a febrile mass of jelly. And so you

can't keep up with the blood pressure and the heart would stop. That's what kills you. But it's unusual to be that amount. You know what piqued my interest there is, earlier I was saying, I think before we started to record, I was saying that I had occasion to interact with the state epidemiologist in Alaska while this was going on. And we got to chatting. And he mentioned that there's sort of a famous version of Trichinosis. People always like, I might mutilate the word,

like Trichinosis spiralis. Trichinella spiralis. Trichinella spiralis. That's the original one. Okay. And he was saying there are a variety of these. Everybody always says that one, but there's a variety of these. And he suggested that there are freeze tolerant specimens in the North and even told me about a case he worked on where some people had eaten raw walrus that had been frozen for the winter.

And they thought it was safe because it was frozen. But in fact, he feels that they tracked the infection to raw walrus. What surprised me about this was two things. One, that a walrus would be a potential carrier of Trichinosis. I don't know why that surprised me, but it just seems unusual. And two, that freezing doesn't kill it because you often will see people say, cook it or freeze it for a long time. And he was saying that he's a proponent of cooking, not trusting the freezing.

Cooking or if you really want to be bold, radiation will do it as well. Cobalt-60 will do it. It won't hurt the meat, but it'll kill off everything that's in it. Is that something people do? Oh, yeah. We do it with spices, for example. People don't know that. The spices you buy in a supermarket have been irradiated.

Yeah, yeah. For safety? For food safety? For food safety. And in fact, the public would be up in arms about it because they think they're going to turn, you know, luminous at night or something. But it's not. Many countries do it for things like onions. You don't get onions sprouting or potatoes won't sprout.

With cobalt-60? There's a number of isotopes you can do. It's much like an x-ray machine. You put the food in little packages, you run it through the machine, you radiate, it comes out the other end. There's no radioactivity in the food. But just like the x-ray has gone through your foot when you x-ray your foot. It's gone through the food, zapped everything alive in there. You can't do it with things like bean sprouts because you want the bean sprout to be alive. You want the seed still to grow.

You can't do something like that. But if you want to kill off anything that's alive in there, you irradiate it. It's wonderful. It's done for the armed services all over the world. So you could take bear meat, run it through that, whatever contraption they do this in, and then just have like... They would have to figure out for that particular trichinella

exactly how much, what the intensity would be for that. Once they've got that sorted out, you'd be safe as houses. Then you could eat all the raw bear meat you want. Taste wouldn't change, but you'd be safe. So one thing we've been talking about lately, because we tend to talk about trick mills is probably too much um is that you mentioned sous vide cooking and uh and i've read and people have emailed me various

things where people are like oh you can you, instead of hitting 160 or 165, you can actually kill it at 140 for a prolonged period of time. Is this sort of, is information like that, and if you don't know the exact numbers, that's fine, I'm not asking you to give them, but is information like that set forth in some sort of official way around sous vide and trichinosis? Like, are you aware of someone formally saying, yes, six hours at 140, you're 100% absolutely safe? Or is that, are these numbers still a little bit elusive? They're very elusive. I don't have the answer for trichinosis. I don't know anybody does, but we were talking about it, and I think it's a good way to go.

The whole process is new. It's in the last, what, couple of decades that people have been interested in doing this. But you need to look at every single one of those organisms. There's about 250 agents that give you foodborne disease, and each one of them would have to be assessed because you're right at the margin. You're right at the edge. I mean, a minute or two short in time and you can have problems.

A degree or two low in temperature. You're right on the edge of the thing. So you've got to be really sure about the science of it. But once that's done for all of these agents, then people stick to it, I think you're going to be okay. And there may be somewhere in there, Trigonella will be tested for that as well. This is kind of an obvious question.

Well, no, it's not because I don't even know the answer to it. Pick any kind of thing that, pick your favorite foodborne pathogen that dies at a certain temperature. What happens at, like, why does it die? What happens to some of these things? Like, you boil water

to sanitize water, whatever. Like, what goes on with the organism that makes

it that it can't get you sick anymore? Main thing is protein. You take an egg, you put

it in the frying pan, it's still moving around, heat it up to about 143 F, whatever the

temperature is. I'm converting from Celsius to Fahrenheit. And suddenly the protein coagulates. It becomes a white protein. It becomes a solid. It doesn't function as a protein. You're getting all kinds of protein chains separating and connecting again. In other words, protein is useless.

And we're all made of protein. So mainly it's the heat that's disabling the protein every single time. And whatever the protein is you're trying to disable, the temperature is slightly different for each one. This is why mad cow disease was a mystery because we found out that's a protein. It's a pure protein. It's not even a virus or anything. But we find that you can heat that to temperatures that no other protein on the planet would survive, and yet this thing does.

Yeah, I heard about some politician that said, it was a private meeting, not my name who said it, but he had said, he was talking about CWD wasn't an issue because we'll just, everybody had to cook their deer meat more, and some guy's like, you got to cook your deer meat to 4,000 degrees. You got to ash it. That's what he did. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, we've got examples of probes

used by a brain surgeon just to explore your brain. And for somebody who was suffering from early stages of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human CJD. And that's all that happened. this probe, stainless steel probe, just went into the brain, and then they sewed him back up, and he's fine. The probe went through hospital sterilization three separate times.

You know, that's 15 pounds pressure, that's 121 C, that's 250 F, right, for 15 minutes. It'll kill off everything on the planet. This was still infective after three of those cycles. Really? In animals, you could give the C, you know, that can make out disease to hamsters three times. So you can't destroy this thing.

Sam, our very own special Sam Longren, explain how... Are you leaving trichinosis? Yeah. I don't have, I can you leaving trichinosis? Yeah. I can't leave trichinosis. You have at it, man. I'm just trying to move through a lot of sicknesses, but I want to...

We got it in 2013, I believe. So now I have billions of cysts in some of my major muscle groups. What's the... They tend to die off. Right. After a while, if nobody eats you, they tend to calcify. They tend to become non-viable. Even if somebody was to take a lump out of your calf muscle,

they wouldn't suffer from it. At what point? By now? I think it varies quite a bit. There's been some work done on animals because you can't really experiment on humans too much. They work on animals and I think it varies quite a bit. There's been some work done in animals because you can't really experiment on humans too much. The work done in animals, I think it begins to a year or two and they're pretty much sure it's gone. Oh, that's it? Yeah. Oh, man.

I like thinking of myself as Trick Pies, man. But you may get exceptions to the rule. In nature, don't underestimate Mother Nature. There's always exceptions. Somebody's going to keep them alive longer. You know what? Pass this along to your colleagues. We know our infection date.

We could tell you the day, like the day that we ingested the meat. Okay. And when did you first have the symptoms? A month later. A month later. We could tell you the day we ingested. We'd have to dig around. We could get you the date.

We could tell you the day we ingested the meat. We could tell you the day that we had the onset onset of symptoms and the first symptoms were not like the latter symptoms were they no yeah we didn't have we didn't have first symptoms no it evolved i first started thinking that i first started feeling like i had like uh just like just oh yeah but everything happened at the a month into it a month into it. A month into it. No, nothing happened. Four of us got sick. Nothing happened to any of us until a month later. And then we like simultaneously had, there was some common themes, some variants from person to person, but some strong common themes of muscle fatigue.

And then we all got, we all got better pretty quick. And then we know like, so we were like a CDC reported case. They had the meat. Point being, if you were talking to any colleagues and they want to do a biopsy, I absolutely would love to do it. If someone wanted to check where they got a known infection date and they wanted to see what's going on inside my calves or whatever, I would love to do a biopsy. I'd give them a chunk of myself too.

Yeah, me and Yanni. All they need is about 0.1 of a gram. Would love to do a biopsy. I'd give them a chunk of myself, too. Yeah, me and Yanni. All they need is about a 0.1 of a gram. Would love to do it. If you're ever at a conference and run into someone who's interested in TRIC. Well, normally after about half a month to three weeks, you get gastrointestinal upset. Yep. And then it goes away a little bit. And then once the little larvae begin to spread throughout the system, that's about a month. And then you begin a month or two, and you begin to get the muscle aches and pains, joint pains and so on. Yeah, but you could just get like the gastrointestinal upset. You know, that just happens for a thousand reasons, right? So that might, you might not.

Don't even know that. Yeah, we all might even had or didn't pay attention to it. Like you get like, you know, whatever, you have a bad day. Yeah. But it wasn't the thing that really, a month later is when we really started texting each other. Take your blood as well. I do a blood test. They're looking for serology, look for antigens to this particular parasite and also for what they call eosinophilia. And I was looking for a certain kind of white blood cell that when you have a parasite, it's suddenly there in vast numbers. It's not normally

there in vast numbers. Parasites trigger the eosinophils in your blood. So there's a lot of blood work can be done as well as biopsies. In order to tell that something's going on. Yeah. Okay, go on. More, Yanni? No, that's, I'm happy. You good?

That's what I wanted to hear. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Okay, Sam, explain the on X club y'all. Okay. Sam, explain the work you were doing that led us to get to talking about our guest,

Tim. Yeah, I was, um, guy used to work for Lantania backcountry hunters and anglers taught me a trick where we're out fishing and you catch a trout. Does this count as a trick? No, it's not really a trick.

Oh, yeah, nice. No, we're just out fishing. You catch a trout and chop it up and put in a bunch of lime juice and jalapenos and parsley and eat it with chips afterwards. And just every. Sort of like a ceviche. Yeah, it is a ceviche. That's what we call it. But everybody freaks out every time you talk about that.

And you wrote an article about it. Yeah, well, I wrote an article about it several years ago. We published a recipe for it in Backcountry Journal when I was there. And we got a lot of letters saying, oh, you shouldn't tell people to do that. It's so dangerous. Fresh, we can't eat freshwater fish raw, like across the board, you can't eat freshwater fish raw. And so, and we did it again this spring and I posted some pictures of it and people freaked out again. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to look into this because you're not dead. I'm surprised I'm not dead too,

especially with what you read online. I mean, mean there was a there was one article from vice news that the headline was like eating freshwater fish will kill you dude that's where i go for all my news about food yeah all my wild all my wild game information comes from vice.com it's bulletproof bulletproof and they're not trying to scare you at all um so i started looking into it and the the surface level review of it corroborated what everyone had said. Pretty much anywhere you look, people are going to say freshwater fish is not okay to eat raw. But I kept digging and kept digging and kept digging and found one of Tim's responses on this website Quora about freshwater fish. And he said almost the opposite thing, that there are much more problems with marine fish than there are with freshwater fish.

And so I reached out through a number of different mechanisms. Is he not good about getting back to people? No, he was. No. I was just on deadline. Because I'll yell at him right now. Yeah. No.

No. And then we had a great conversation about that. And someone as esteemed in his profession as him told me the exact opposite thing from what everybody told me what I was reading online. And made me feel really good about eating freshwater fish raw and really sketched out about sushi. And then I told, I told you that this guy's, uh, knows a lot about foodborne illnesses. And we talked about, uh, trichinosis and tularemia and a bunch of things. And I thought he'd be a great podcast guest. Yeah.

So I want to, uh, we can take turns. I want to ask about specific things that I hear about fish. Yeah. Okay. In Southeast Alaska, it's a commonly held belief. Go ahead and eat anything, any of the fish raw, but one doesn't eat a raw salmon, the worst being a raw king salmon, because you'll get worms and be all sick. You buying that?

And that the halibut worms don't worry about. The worms that proliferate in halibut, which I, when my wife asks what they are, I say that's just part of the halibut. When I was working up there, man, the Dover sole and flounder would be bumpy with those worms. Yeah. Okay. Let's look at marine worms first. Get them out of the way.

There are many nematodes, little round worms, some bigger than others, that affect marine fish. Some people call them a cod worm. They belong to the genus like Pseudoterra nova, Anisakis, Phoconema. These are the worms. We've all eaten them by the hundreds, not even knowing it because normally the fish we buy in the supermarket is frozen or we've cooked it. But they only occur in marine fish. They go through a cycle.

It varies a little bit. They go through either sort of seals and then back into fish and then like the adult on the larva, adult on the larva. If we eat raw marine fish, there is a chance, it's not very common,

but there is a chance that you can ingest one of these worms. Let's call it an anisarchis, a more common one. It forms a little coil up, a little bit bigger than your trigonosis coil. And if it's raw, you can eat it, and it'll come out of its little cyst. It'll wonder what the hell is going on. It'll start to penetrate through the wall of your intestine.

It'll wander around your guts for a while and then die. In other words, we cannot be the definitive host for that. It's looking for a seal, and we're not a seal. So it will die. On route, it can do little bits of damage. It can cause little bits of pain. It can even, in rare cases, set up a peritonitis, an inflammation of the gut, or even appendicitis, for example, just because it's poking its way into the wrong area.

But it will die. It's called a visceral lava migrans, a VLM by that stage. So you're not going to all of a sudden, like, puke up a bunch of these things? It's happened in Nova Scotia and northern Canada. A bunch of people had a fire at the beach. They gathered to eat raw. And a lot of the fish they eat raw. And then after they went to the tent,

one of the women is coughing and up comes these worms, little worms. But that's how they uncorral themselves. They're about a centimeter long. But they hadn't reproduced in her. No, no, no, no. She just ingested them. They can't.

And is that because their ultimate host is like a saltwater biome? It's a marine mammal. Yeah. But our system is more freshwater and they can't. Our system? No. It's very particular proteins that these parasites want.

And we don't have the seals protein. Look at whales and seals and walrus. Different marine mammals for different species of worm. But that's what they're looking for between the fish and the mammal. We are an incidental host, a dead end host. whales and seals and walrus, different marine mammals with different species of worm. But that's what they're looking for between the fish and the mammal. We are an incidental host, a dead-end host. Now, that's the reason. How long? You can just weave this into whatever you're going to go into next,

but you say, like, he roams around and dies. How long are we talking about? Like, let's say you eat a piece of raw salmon and get a worm. Oh, a matter of days, a week or so. Oh, okay. But here's the thing. Outside of Japan, if you like sushi. And I do.

All the meat has been frozen. It's a kind of an agreed way to deal with meat, especially if you live, Toronto is a thousand miles from the ocean. Here, you're a long way from the ocean. So if you're going to get really fresh fish, you want it frozen on the fishing boat and then only thawed out when it's in your sushi chef's hands.

That's really fresh stuff. And that doesn't mean it keeps fresh. It also means it's killed off the worm. Those worms are killed off by freezing. And that's useful for a lot of people, but us and many people in our audience like to get those fish ourselves. And one thing I came across in this research is that the freezing level required to kill

many of these parasites is much lower than you can attain. Than your household freezer. Exactly. That'll be the case for trichinella for sure. But most of these other worms are fairly easily killed off by freezing. But some species of fish are vastly more wormy than others. And there are other worms, I didn't mention

the much longer ones. For example, yellowtail tuna has got some rather large worms in there. You can see they're very macroscopic. And they can mess you up. No, they're going to be a dead end in you. They're a bit objectionable to see this sort of wriggling thing like a little bit of spaghetti, you know, in the raw sushi.

But this is why most of the fish outside of Japan is frozen before it reaches the sushi chef. I read in Japan that something like a quarter of the cases of appendicitis are actually mistaken cases of the anisakis infection. So people go to the hospital and they're like oh we got to get your appendix out and then oh no you just have a gut full of worms.

So what the surgeon sometimes does and finds out it wasn't the appendix they'll whip out the appendix anyway. They've got the person open and it'll stop the future. No it wasn't the appendix. They'll whip out the appendix anyway. They've got the person open and it may, it'll stop the future. No, it doesn't, it doesn't always happen like that. Yeah.

So it would happen. Now that's marine parasites. Well, I'm not, I'm not ready to move on yet. Okay. Uh, if you had to rate how, uh, me and Yanni here, uh, been eating a fair bit of, uh, we're eating a fair bit of raw yellowtail, eating a fair bit of raw yellowtail. Not yellowfin, but yellowtail, which is a jack.

Okay. Have never, like right out of the damn water. Okay. Never frozen. Would you, if you were hanging out with us. This is the sea fish, ocean fish. Ocean fish. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ocean fish. Ocean fish, yeah. So there you are, you're hanging out with us. Yeah. We're like, oh my gosh, look what we caught. And we cut it up. Would you, where would you fall on that would you be like no way bro or would you say the risk is so small i will enjoy it with you i'd enjoy it with you oh okay so we're not like stupid for having no i've i've eaten i've been to taiwan and i've had when they bring in the

giant tuna and it's a ceremony the chief chief chef there slices it, and everybody's looking. The newspapers and television's there. This is worth $10,000, this giant tuna. It's a wonderful fish. Okay. So you know everything you know, and you would still eat. Yeah, because that parasite can't do any real damage to us. Really?

Not really. It can't. It real damage to us. Really? Not really. It can't. It wanders around you a little bit. See, especially there's some fish like hake. Anybody know about hake? Yeah, I'm familiar with hake. Or merluza, it's sometimes called, or some monkfish, for example. These are the really tasty fish.

Or even some of the flatfish, too. Like you mentioned, doves' hole. These fish are sometimes very wormy. But cook them and they're fine. But if you don't cook them, it's not the end

of the world. That's good to know. Yeah. Okay. Now we can move on to freshwater fish. Freshwater fish. Okay.

In this country, in this country, the only real freshwater fish you're going to worry about is a tapeworm. No, back up because you're Canadian. I'm sorry, North America.

Okay, good. As opposed to Southeast Asia. Yeah, all right. We'll go with North America. North America. It's a worm. It's called a long name, Diphyllobothium latum. It'll grow up to about 10 meters or 10 yards long,

almost the whole length of your intestine. Yeah, I put a story in my article about this, about a guy who pulled five feet of one out of his own. Yeah. This is freshwater fish. And you know where a lot have been written on in Jewish housewives would make a thing called gefilte fish. Oh, yeah, man.

Fish balls, stewed. White fish, pike, carp. Fish balls, sort of stewed. White fish, pie, carp. White fish, exactly. And what she would do before she boiled them in the liquid, she would taste it

to make sure there was enough salt in it. Either too much or not enough salt added in it, but she would taste the raw fish. She was the one in the family

who got this tapeworm and the rest of the family didn't because they added after these things were boiled in the fish stores, fish stew. So this particular worm, though, is a bit objectionable when people say, you know, a 10-meter, 10-yards-long worm. It's not going to cause much of a problem. You might have one inside you now and not even know it. If you're well-fed, you've got enough food to feed you and a couple of these worms.

More than well-fed. So it can eat – so that worm can you've got enough food to feed you and a couple of these worms. More than well fed. So it can eat, so that worm can live for a while. That can live for a long time. But he can't reproduce. Yep. It can reproduce in you.

As you defecate, you're going to leave little, what they call, preglottids, little tiny bits of ribbony tape come out with your feces

and if that gets, in this particular case, gets into the water course, then there's an intermediate, usually a mollusk, a small snail creature, is the intermediate host. And the fish eats that thing and it gets the cycle. I'm confused now because this big ass, the 10 meter worm. Yeah. You get it from what?

What fish can you get it from what? What fish can you get it from? Freshwater fish. But this thing doesn't exist in salt water. Well, it does if the fish lives in both waters.

Oh. So salmon or one two punch. Salmon and char. So why were you saying that? Okay. If this one can get in you

and it can live in you and it can reproduce but it's not it's not can get in you and it can live in you and it can reproduce, but it's not detrimental. It's not reproducing in you. It's fertilizing another one of the same species and you're excreting out the bits. So you can't get it reproducing within you as an isolated unit, you see. But there's no detrimental effect from this thing? Not really.

If you were really malnourished, you know, it would be difficult to keep a couple of these worms going. Tapeworms are not really dangerous. Is that right? Yeah. That's good to know. Yeah, so when's got one of these? Likely.

No. But yeah, salmon is one, and we have had, we had a conference of businessmen, I think they were in northern British Columbia, and at part of their conference they wanted to taste, because from all over the world, they wanted to taste British Columbia fresh salmon. It was smoked, not in the Northwest Pacific style, you know, which is where you hot smoke it. This is the traditional cold smoking. Yep. And I think four or five of these businessmen came down with both the marine worms and the tapeworm. It's about the only fish this will happen to. Okay. Came down in what way? How did they know?

They had a serology that showed that they'd been attacked by these little marine worms. But they weren't sick and didn't die. No, they had some pains, but they did have a tapeworm and that showed up as well. Eventually, the stool samples showed that it was there as well. But it's a very unusual case where you get both kinds of parasite and the only fish that will work is Arctic

char, which is a member of the salmon family or any of the salmons. And we think eel as well, but we haven't seen examples of that yet, but we think eel would work. I just had Arctic char raw several weeks ago when I was in Iceland. Yeah. Eel, uh, quick little lesson that my favorite

word is catadronous. Oh yeah. Yeah. Like, uh, everyone knows anadromous fish, which live in the ocean and spawn in the rivers, but eels live in the rivers and spawn in the rivers, but eels live in the rivers and spawn in the ocean. We had a little scare at my house recently where all of a sudden everybody's all excited because one of my kids had defecated out a bunch of real thin tapeworms. So I went out to investigate.

You sure they were tapeworms? No. went out to investigate. You showed him the tapeworms? No. Well, you know what he was eating? We had made summer sausage and put it in the collagen casing. And I sliced a bunch for him, and I didn't realize that he didn't know to take the casing off. But it's cutting these discs, and he's eating these things all day long. And he's, I don't know how many chunks of collagen sausage casing, which he then passes out.

You look in the bowl. It looks like, I'm like, I looked at him and I kept looking. I'm like, what? And I went and got a pair of latex gloves and I pulled them out. This is all these rings of collagen sausage casing. What you will get, and I've had them, people calling up and saying, quickly, come over, look in the toilet. And there's somebody who's been on the toilet, and down the toilet, there's a bunch of moving worms. Yeah.

Spaghetti kind of worms. Okay. And they're all round worms, and some are about five inches long, and some are about seven inches long. Real worms. Real worms. Okay. And these are Ascaris lumbricoides. These are the round worm called Ascaris worms.

Oh, the kids get playing in sandboxes. Well, that's one way of doing it. And these worms can plug up your intestine. They're so dense. I've taken a pig intestine when I used to be an inspector in the slaughterhouse, sliced through the intestine, and no food could really get through it because you just cut through about 27 little worms at the same time just to have through the intestine.

No kidding. So these people are in a really bad way. I mean, they're not digesting any food, and they're all bloated and edematous and so on. How do they get that? They get that through eating on the food the cystic eggs of this particular worm. There was a village in Scotland going back to about 1930, I think it was, isolated little village.

And the physician, I think, retired for some reason. And the new physician came along. And the first morning in the waiting room, the first patient came in. And he said, how are you today? And the woman said, oh, just the usual cough. Coughed up a few worms. Just the usual. Nothing much.

And he said, what do you call it? Coughing up worms. It turned out the whole village had Ascaris worms in them. And they were seeding themselves. Why? Because they were using night soilage, you know. They were collecting sewage in their houses in buckets and putting it on the gardens and growing vegetables.

Oh, there you go. And so this is, then we had a couple of scientists, I think they were German, who decided to experiment on themselves, good scientists. And they seeded some strawberries in a strawberry patch one year with Ascaris eggs. And then every year they ate about a pound or so of strawberries. And every year for about five or six years, both of them got Ascaris worms. So these things can live for a number of years through frost cycles.

The eggs can because they're almost really dried up like a spore. So these things are around, but normally in the food that we eat, we don't have, you know, we found them on paper money. No kidding. A coin. You know, I was just yelling at my kid two days ago to stop.

He had a $5 Billy's running around within his mouth. Don't, yeah, don't do that. I was telling him, I was like, man, don't put money in your mouth. And he's like, why? I'm like I was telling him, I was like, man, don't put money in your mouth. And he's like, why?

I'm like, I don't know, I just understand that it's something you're not supposed to do. What you should do in the States

is have what we have in Canada, plastic money. Yeah, we're not that far along yet. Plastic money, see?

You can put it in a washing machine. It's all different sizes though. We like to be able to burn our money. Yeah, you put it

in a washing machine and it'll still be in the pocket when you come out. Don't iron it though, it our money. Yeah, I know. You put it in the washing machine, it'll still be in the bucket when you come out. Don't do the ironing, though. It melts. Okay. Good to know.

Man, that's good stuff. I had a thought, but I can't remember what my thought was. I got a thought. I want to hear about some of the nastier worms in the flukes. reading about a village or community in Thailand, I believe, that has extremely high prevalence of liver cancer due to some raw fish preparation that involves live red ants, but there's some liver fluke in their regional fishes.

But I'm just talking about. You lost me. Okay. They're getting sick from eating ants or they're getting sick from eating liver flukes? Liver flukes in fish. The ants, that's tangential. That's what they thought it was initially.

Oh, they're like, oh, you're all sick because you're eating too many ants. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's a number of things. That's why I said Southeast Asia just a while. Yes. That's why I was coming back to it. There are a number of flukes there, including Clonarchus sinensis, the Chinese liver fluke, which is a very – one of the intermediate hosts for this is a crab.

It's a marine crab. It's called the mitten crab because the adult, on its claws, it's got algae that grows just like big, hairy mittens. Now, I've eaten this crab when I was in Shanghai and Hong Kong. It's the sweetest crab meat you'll ever meet. It's delicious. But you've got to cook it because it's carrying the larval form of the

liver fluke, which gets into your liver and your bile ducts, and it can cause all kinds of problems with your liver. And of course that irritation, irritation or inflammation is by definition an early form of what we would call like promoters in cancer. If you have any kind of inflammation, it can lead to a cancer down the road, not it will.

So this is one and we found that fish farming, the kind of fish farming they do in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, there's a lot of liver flukes coming out of that. So you've got to cook the fish. And of course my relatives and so on in Hong Kong, they don't like to cook. They like the freshest possible seafood and shrimps and lobsters. They'll undercook it deliberately because they want that fresh, just like your bear meat. How do you have relatives in Hong Kong? My third wife is from Hong Kong.

You've been married three times. Yes. You're still married to her now? No. Really? Real quick, we'll get back to what we're talking about. What do you think makes it so, how are you so difficult to live with? Oh, I don't know. I've already talked about worms, creepy crawlers, slimy things, you know. Oh, man. That's terrible. Not terrible. I mean, you're fine and everything. I just think about, like, I'd hate to have to, you know, like my buddy Ronnie once said, he goes, I don't want to lose half my stuff, but I have great in-laws all over the world now. International. That's convenient.

Yeah, look at the positives. We were talking about the Philippines. One of the more, you'll appreciate this story as someone who specializes in foodborne pathogens. We hiked into a village in the Philippines one time. Like not on the road system at all. You had to hike way into the mountains. In the highlands of Luzon. Luzon, yeah. luzon like the main island yeah and we and i slept in a house one night where

the the house is built on on pilings built on stilts and they had like portions of the house were like widely spaced planks the reason the house is on pilings as best I could tell is below the house was a pen. And the pen is where they fatten dogs and pigs. And so all human waste and all food scrap just would go through the floor down to the dogs and pigs which you then consumed and i'm not a squeamish person but i remember having uh just a feeling of like this seems like a good place for me to get sick hanging out like in this in this proximity to to sort of like just watching like the recycling of human excrement the parallel to that is in some areas around the coast of some countries in Southeast Asia, the same thing with fish, fish farming, where the fish is kept in a pen right underneath

the house on stilts. So all the waste goes down there. When you think about it, I mean, the pig has got an amazing alimentary canal and the pig eats its own waste and the waste from other animals as well, because it's in fact extracting the food that the original eater left behind. And the pig can use that. And the pig puts on weight because of that. What's the term elementary canal? Elementary canal. What does that mean? From the mouth to the uranus. It's your whole, the whole canal. And what's the word? Alimentary. Not elementary, al, A-L. Oh, I've never heard that word yeah what does it mean it's that uh it's that canal where you digest that in and of itself is that

that's not an adjective oh no no well it's an adjective for canal yeah okay okay um and it has an amazing one of these yeah yeah very effective. Very effective, a pig. Because you're saying something else can eat and pass and not absorb nutrients from them, but it can eat those droppings and pick up his sloppy seconds or whatever you want to call it. Exactly, yeah. Exactly.

So again, if there's cooking done properly, and people aren't eating raw pork in China. Are not. No. Now, sometimes you get a lot of raw meats in Cambodia and Vietnam. But China, they cook even lettuce. They cook lettuce. And this is why it's the safest food to eat is properly done Chinese food.

It's all cooked. Yeah. And this is really the lesson with our hunting fraternity. Either boil it or bake it or stop something biting you and wash your hands, just like Granny told us. The wisdom is there. Do that, you won't get trichinosis or any of these tapeworms either. You know what else happened in the same Philippine village

that I thought was a cool system and didn't make me feel like I was going to get sick is that they had terraced. They were in the very steep mountains and they had terraced rice paddies that they'd built over thousands of years. And their rotational system would be that they'd sow rice and farm rice.

And then when one of the paddies came out of, out of a rice harvest, they would do tilapia. They would do fish in it, flood it, and do fish in it as like a regenerative practice, harvest the fish, drain the thing out, and then do a rice crop in there. Yeah. To fertilize the... And they're also feeding the fish as well.

They've got to feed the fish. And because the fish droppings accumulate and the remains of the food, that's the nitrogen for the next crop of rice. It's a wonderful cyclical thing. It should delight all the organic farmers in this part of the world. They don't call it organic in that part of the world. They just call it farming. We've often said organic farming is really the rich people showing off what they can do.

It's nothing to do with reality. Yeah, for sure. Let's do to do with reality. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Let's do toxoplasmosis because our buddy, you know, he's supposed to be dropping by today. One of our buddy's wives, man, I think she was pregnant. Toxoplasmosis. Really? Stay away from cats then.

She should stay away from cats. She's pregnant. But you can get it from eating game meat, right? Yep. Talk about, this is the one of these ones I don't even know, I don't understand what the hell it is.

Okay, now we're leaving bacteria behind now. We're into the area of a parasite. Is that okay? A single-celled parasite.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Toxoplasma gondii. It's not named after Gandhi. Oh,

no, it's different. No, Gandhi, G-O-N-D-I, double I. Do you remember when Dr. Christian Barnard, you may not remember, you were too young.

If you're old as me, you remember. He was the first guy who did a heart transplant in South Africa. No, no recollection. And he was on a- He was the first guy to perform one? Perform one. Okay. And so he was doing a study tour.

I think it was in Harvard, I think it was, and one of the New England medical schools and all the medical students were there wanting to hear Dr. Barna talk about this first time ever heart transplant. The break came they rushed across the road there Do you remember roughly what year that would have been? Probably about 1972 or something like that. And they rushed across the road to a little hamburger guy and they swarmed him. 1967. 67. Okay, a few years later.

And he couldn't keep up the hamburgers. They kicked him. Quick, we've got to get back. So he was half cooking the hamburgers. I got lost. Who's eating burgers? This medical student who came to this lecture. They swarmed across the road to the hamburger seller

who was quickly half cooking them across the road to the hamburger seller who was quickly half-cooking them and giving them to the medical system who went back in. He's got a mad rush. It turned out that some four or five

or six of these people developed toxoplasmosis from the raw hamburger. Okay. It doesn't usually happen with beef. It's usually other animals, but, you know,

sometimes your hamburger isn't a hamburger. There's other meats as well mixed in. So that, for a while, became known as Barnard syndrome, where medical students developed something from eating a hamburger. But back to your original question. Named after the guy that performed the first heart surgery. Yeah, yeah, only locally.

Just because he was there giving a lecture. Only locally. That guy's got to be like, yeah, come on, man. Come on. Anyway, let's call it burger syndrome. This little parasite, they've recently rewritten some of the medical books because of this. What happened in British Columbia, in Victoria? Let me back up a little bit.

The main reservoir for this organism is cats. All of the feline. I knew I didn't like cats. Well, no. Like them or not, it doesn't matter. They carry this thing around with them. And they defecate. And if it's, for example, if it's taken in for a human body, it doesn't normally cause anything too nasty. But if you're pregnant and you're in the early stages of pregnancy, this thing

can mess up your barrier and it can end up with some pretty nasty deformities and unfortunate things for the infant. So women should keep away from that. We had an outbreak in Victoria, you know, the beautiful capital city in Vancouver Island. It's been a lot of time there. And these were outbreak of toxoplasmosis among people who had never had raw meat, never had game meat,

never kept cats. Where the hell were they getting it from? Long story short, it was the boil down to the water. And the water was in a reservoir

above the city in the highland. And they traced it back and the cougars wildcats mountain lions who get there cougars catamounts well whatever you call them painters in canada they call them cougars they had toxoblasma they were defecating around the beach area of the reservoir these little things were entering the water now victoria filters and chlorinates its water like like every good city does,

but the filtering may have let some of these through, and the chlorine was not enough. This is the big thing about these things. Normal chlorine will kill bacteria. It won't kill these parasites. You need to treble the amount of chlorine in the water. Now, if you look in the Cumulonormal Diseases book, it said it can't be transmitted to water that's been contaminated by cats' feces. That's really interesting. So the main way of getting it isn't eating deer meat. It can be. It can be eating, very often it's domestic meat.

But deer meat, yep. Oh, so people get toxoplasmosis from domestic meat. Yeah, cows, sheep, mutton, sometimes pork, deer, moose. Yep, yep. Does that die at a certain temperature? Oh, yeah. sheep, mutton, sometimes pork, deer, moose. Does that die at a certain temperature? Oh, yeah. You can kill it. It doesn't form spores. It doesn't form spores.

You can kill it at a normal cooking temperature. We'll do that again, about 160 again for Fahrenheit. Magic 160. Absolutely, because it's the denatured protein. Best not to tangle it with if you've got pregnant women around. I should tell you an interesting story about this, too. This parasite is one of those that's been studied to see how it affects the victim.

You may have come across it. It's almost science fiction where mice are affected with Toxoplasma gondii. They behave in a reckless way. They come out and they almost like pull in faces at the cat if you paint a silly picture. In other words, can you see the logic here? They're almost asking to be eaten and to regenerate their cycle again. We've seen this in some fungus, which

we don't get in North America. Claviceps would be one of those. It grows in China, in the mountainous Nepal. The fungus inoculates a larva, a worm. The worm then does something strange. It climbs up on a blade of grass, dies, and then the fungus consumes the worm and forms little sporing bodies that forms the spore. In other words,

it tells the spore. It drives it up to a good place for dispersal. So Mother Nature, you see, never underestimate the power of Mother Nature.

So like kamikaze mice. Oh, here we go. That's probably not the right way. I started to write a story actually about this affecting humans. It's like a fictitious story,

but it never got beyond the first chapter yet. But I may dig it up. A lot of stories go like that. You think you got something good, but you just don't feel like doing it. You don't really feel like doing it. You got to stay with it. Oh, yeah. You guys good on that one?

Yes. Toxoplasmosis. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Rabies. Oh, dear. Do you have rabies here? I'm sure you do. Me? I mean, in Montana.

No doubt. I mean, is there places that don't have rabies? Some places more than others. We, Ontario, we have some of the highest density of rabies anywhere in North America. Oh, I didn't know that. I didn't know that. I guess because we're surrounded by lakes and rivers and two sides of a triangle.

So, all these wildlife are in there, the pressure of the wildlife and cities and so on. So, we get this, every health district has got families taking shots all the time. Rabies, yeah. Let's start out with what it is. Okay, a viral disease disease it's a virus a virus it's a lissa virus it's got a number of relatives but they're all

deadly for all its intents and purposes are 100% fatal nobody survives but the curious thing about it it's one of the few diseases that you can still use a vaccine after you've been infected normally that doesn't happen't happen. Yeah, because in the old days, like not even the old days, not that long ago, when you got rabies, man, it was like you were in trouble. Isn't that correct?

Well, if you had no treatment, you died. That's the trouble you're in. Do you know, do you guys, in Canada, you guys probably aren't really huge into Daniel Boone. Are you familiar with Daniel Boone? The name rings a bell. Walt Disney made a movie, I think, didn't he?

That's right. But yeah, you guys are doing yourselves a favor to get into Daniel Boone. But Boone was in one of his camps one time. A guy, there was a bunch of guys sleeping around a fire in one of Boone's camps. They had just been in a skirmish with some Indians, and they were kind of regrouping. But anyways, a wolf came in. It was, as they tell, like the wolf was kind of like very fixated on one person

for whatever reason. This guy got bit on the head or face. I can't remember where he got bit. He was sleeping. He got bit on the head or face. Some months go by, and they're night hunting on the clinch river uh with they just drift the rivers at night with torches and the guy has this outbreak of hydrophobia and goes berserk the guy his hunting partner has actually jump

out of the canoe to get away from the guy who's going berserk with hydrophobia he his the episode ends he's so afraid of he's going to hurt somebody that he instructs his friends to tie him up and they bind him up and take him home and then he has another big outbreak or whatever you call it, and dies. From the first symptom to the death wouldn't be more than 10 days, 11 days at the most. Really? Always. So if they did get him Oh, it'll always do.

Okay. See, this is a very strange disease. You get bitten by a rabbit dog or a wolf or a coyote or a fox or a bat or anything like this. The bite inoculates you with a virus. Okay. Now, the virus doesn't affect where it is. There's sometimes a bit of a swelling there, but it soon heals up and you think, oh, that's fine.

Meanwhile, the virus is now working its way toward your central nervous system, upper spinal cord and brain especially. And it can take, depending on where you're bitten, a bitten on the big toe, it can take many months, six, seven months. Bitten on the leg or something, a knee, maybe four or five months. Bitten around the shoulder, the neck, the face, maybe a few weeks. Shorter distance to travel. Right. Once it gets to the brain, then the encephalitis starts, the brain inflammation starts. Also, the parotid glands, the salivary glands at the side become very heavily loaded with virus.

And that's when the symptoms start. The symptoms, you call it hydrophobia. That's what Pasteur called it, actually. Is that not accurate? What is hydrophobia? Hydrophobia is when the symptoms begin, the throat becomes extreme. You've had a strep sore throat. Well, magnify that by about 50 times. The throat is on fire.

It's closed. You can't drink anything and you're dying of starvation. You see a glass of water. You try and sip and the pain is unbearable. So you want the water, but the pain is all incredible. So it looks like you're afraid of water. You're afraid of touching it because of the pain. It's nothing to do with fear of water.

It's just because of the pain. But why was it of note to the guys? I think that, I can't remember his name. The guy that, there was a historian that collected up a lot of these narratives. I can't remember his name, but it was of note in the story that they were out in a canoe on the river when the guy had an episode. Nothing to do with it. I mean, other than the fact that he might have tried to drink the river water, which you can do, of course. And that's maybe when he first felt this horrible pain in the throat.

But any water will do it. But you die in a thirst. You're burning up because of the fever and the thirst. And you touch water and it's agony. That's why it looks like it's. However, look at the beauty of this. You've got to look at the beauty of it. Right?

I am trying. The saliva from the salivary glands becomes loaded with virus. Okay. Meanwhile, the saliva that's in your mouth, you can't swallow. We're always swallowing saliva. There you can't. It's plugged up. So you're drooling.

You're foaming. Frothing at the mouth. Frothing at the mouth. And that's what the virus is. All right. Now bring in the aggressive form of rabies. Sometimes there's a dumb form where you just sort of go in the corner and become a vegetable, but more often you become aggressive.

And if it's a wild animal, it's got no fear of any other thing either. Fox will come out of the brush and give you a bite. You know, you never do that normally. So now you've got the aggression, the bite, the saliva full of virus, and the cycle starts again. It's just a perfect storm, if you like. Do squirrels carry rabies? Any animal can carry rabies.

We even found it in mice. In a laboratory, you can inoculate an animal. But remember that it's going to get it from being in a conflict with another animal. Usually, the small animals would die and be eaten, usually. The reason I bring that up, let me tell you something that happened to me. There has been positive squirrels, though. We were in a pool one time in Hamptons. You familiar with the Hamptons out in Long Island?

We're in a pool, and a squirrel comes running up. I was in there with my kids, our friends, kids. Everybody's in the pool. Squirrel comes running up and starts running up and down the side of the pool frantically kind of casing everybody out then the squirrel jumps into the pool and i think well he's gonna he's not gonna like that but then he starts coming at people in the pool swimming and i grabbed him up by the tail and whooped him so hard that it killed him. Do you think that we always wondered what kind of trip he was on?

Could have been. This happened before with squirrels. In fact, just a matter of about two or three weeks ago only, there were two episodes with foxes, almost the same as you're saying. They're both in the eastern part of the United States, where in one case, a woman was walking or jogging, I think it was, and a squirrel,

sorry, a fox came out of the undergrowth and went straight for her and bit her. And here she is sort of wondering what the hell to do. And the neighbor's dog, I think, came along

and chased the fox away and killed it. And eventually, the head was found to be positive. It's what caused rabies in this fox. So did the dog die too? No, the dog was probably vaccinated. The dog could then get the shots.

Gotcha. In that intervening period between the bite and going up to the brain. So the person who has rabies, getting back to your guy in the canoe, if he had bitten somebody, it's possible that he could have passed it on. But of course, humans don't normally get to the point of biting other humans.

But technically, there's no reason why it wouldn't happen. Why are the bulk of rabies cases, why do they come from bats? No, not the majority. No, if you go to Asia, the majority is dogs. Feral dogs, wild dogs, you know, stray dogs. In North America, it's really raccoons, skunks, foxes, bats. That's about it. In Central America, it's bats and cattle.

Because you get the… Cattle. Cattle. Because you're looking at the bats that eat, that drink blood. Vampire bats. And they'll bite the cattle around the ankles. Next thing you know, the cow has got rabies. Who's he going to bite?

He doesn't, but the cow obviously is in trouble. It can't feed. The farmer says it hasn't fed for a while. It's behaving. Normally the vet comes and says something's stuck in its throat. So you know what vets do? They put the big, long, and they into the throat, nothing in there. But now the vet gets bitten, and the vet has to take the shots.

The cow was rabid, but you didn't think of that. A rabid cow. A rabid cow. So any animal can be rabid. In fact, we didn't have raccoon rabies in Ontario, in Canada, until some bright spark brought up a semi a semi trailer from I think it was Georgia full of raccoons because somebody up there wanted to go hunting raccoons in New England Maine and Vermont and didn't

have many raccoons there so they said let's bring some up from Georgia so they brought up apparently they brought up one ass once so next thing we know that crossing over the bridges into Canada, along the Brockville area. We're getting raccoon rabies appearing. So what they tried there was something that's now been picked up in the United States. They euthanized, they trapped and killed every, for one kilometer, about a half a mile. And then around for 10 kilometers, that's about four miles, they dropped rabies vaccine baits

in the form of meatballs. Yeah, there's a whole line in the U.S. where they use those. That's where they started using it. It's so successful, they're now doing it in the states all over the place. Yeah, there's like some line.

Do you guys know where the line runs? Through the eastern U.S. somewhere, north to south, I think. There's like a line where they airdrop rabies vaccination. Either Ohio or Pennsylvania, somewhere like that.

Pennsylvania sticks them up. I can't remember where. Remember we talked about that, he's a wildlife disease specialist. Brian Richards was telling us about that. Yeah. All I remember is that it was done on the east coast. Okay, let's talk about. Well, two-way bats. I finished with bats, though. Okay, let's talk about... Do you have bats?

I finished with bats, though. Oh, no, go on. I have an extra problem with a bat. You have an extra problem with bats? Yeah, yeah, we have extra problems. We think that the bats possibly can spread the virus as an aerosol. Now, that really gets you worried. Because normally you need to have a bite.

Most physicians will say, let me see your leg. Have you actually been bitten by the animal? And they've got to see a little puncture mark or something. But with a bat, we have some evidence to show that a bat flying around a bedroom, terrifying the people in the house, can possibly spread

by aerosol. Just his saliva. Saliva in the air. And not only that, the bat's teeth are so needle-like that people have woken up, not the Canada,

but the States, woken up and there's been a bat sitting on the chest somewhere. They wake up and the bat flies away. And they didn't, they really looked closely

and they didn't know they could actually see a little tiny mark on the skin of the teeth. Oh, that's a rough way to wake up.

So that's tough for the bat. That's a rough way to end it. That's tough for the bat. And also, last thing for the bat, we think it can live longer in its infective stage. Normally, remember about the dog or the other animal? Yeah, yeah. 10 days maximum.

Between the symptoms, the infective start, by the time you're dead, it's usually 5 or 6 or 7 days, less than 10. Bat, we think, can be longer than that. So that creates like a little extra.

Yeah. And if you don't like bats, that's okay. But look, bats spread SARS. You remember SARS back in 2003? Yeah. We thought it was a thing called a civet cat. It wasn't. The civet cat got it from bats in China.

Ebola, you know Ebola? Sure. From bats. If any listeners already didn't like bats, they're really going to hate bats. Bats are hurting, man. They are with the white nose. Yeah, my kids just went on a tour of a bat cave. Yeah.

Well, Lewis and Clark Caverns, which has bats in it. They went on a tour and the tour people were curious what other caves, what all caves they'd been in. And if you'd been in another cave or something like that, you couldn't go in this cave. Really? Yeah.

They hadn't been in any, I don't know if they reported it. But they had 95 masks on in the cave? You know, it's hard to get information from little kids. But I got the gist of it. But, you know, they could have messed something up. But I got the gist of it. But, you know, they could have messed something up. But I do believe them that someone inquired about what other cave and they've been involved in. Because there's a lot of fungus and things that can grow in the bat guano on the floor of the cave. Yeah, and that's what kills.

There's like this. What's it called again, Sam? White nose syndrome. Yeah, white nose syndrome. Yeah, white nose syndrome. But there's also some other stuff like histoplasmosis, for example, which can grow in that. There's another single cell, like toxoplasma, which can be inhaled.

Lung disease. Are you comfortable coming back on the show sometime? Yeah, we got a lot to talk about. Well, because we're not going to get through all the diseases, man. No, not even close. But I want to hit, like... I think we got to hit Giardia.

Okay, go on. Yeah. Giardia. No, let's do Giardia. Let's do Giardia. Okay. Yeah, because that's very... It's right now.

People are going into the woods. They've got their SteriPens. They've got their water filters. Here? Well, I have a friend who just... Oh, yeah, man. I have a friend who just got the Campylobacteriosis. Oh, Campylobacter.

From drinking water out hunting. Yeah. Let's talk about drinking water out in the woods. Okay, drinking water in the woods. Okay, so, okay. Jada would come into that in a big way. Single-celled parasite now. If you look at it in the way that most textbooks look at it,

it looks like a little balloon with two big eyes. These are actually suckering discs. Oh, it looks like a little balloon with two big eyes. These are actually sucking disks. Oh, it sounds cute. It sounds really cute. You say it looks like a balloon with two big eyes? Yeah, like a pear-shaped thing with two eyes in there.

But it's not eyes. They're not eyes. They're actually sucking disks. They're resistant to chlorine. And if you go, a colleague of mine does a lot of work in the far north of Canada

up there and research in the tundra, you know, Eskimos are into it. And almost everybody has had Jad ISIS at some point or another. Well, that contradicts what I've been told by people is that when you get up to the Arctic slope, you don't have it anymore. Oh, that's not true. There's all kinds of Jad up there. It's living quite happily. Now, it doesn't kill you off usually, but it causes a lot of chronic intestinal problems. Oh, we've all had it, man.

Chronic. Foul-smelling diarrhea that keeps – starts and stops. You get all burpy. You get burpy. Oh, yeah. And it's not continuous, but it's, so it can be treated. There's a number of good anti-parasitic

preparations, but some of them are as bad as a parasite. My brother once said that he almost thought it was worth getting Giardia

because of the relief the medication brought. He was like, Giardia medicine and Tums and acid are like two medicines that he likes because you take it and all of a sudden you feel a lot better. And he really appreciated it. That's like the logic of hitting head against a brick wall and stopping, the joy of stopping. Giardia is spreading and hardly anybody's free of it's hardly anybody's free of it.

Hardly anybody's immune to it. If you're out there with the water that's not been boiled properly, boiling will kill it. Boiling will kill it. How long? Oh, even bringing it to boiling point, I'd say a minute or two, but to be in the safe side, about five minutes. And you cool it down again, you're safe as anything. Nothing will happen. But, of course, what's the container you're going to put it in?

If you're going to use it for something else, where have your hands been? I mean, you know, there's a chain of infection going along here. And it's in the environment. I mean, every bit of fresh water or plant you may pick out of the fresh water, or fish you've pulled out of the mud or something, that's where the jar is. It's everywhere. Yeah, but people – but, yeah, I get what you're saying, and I accept what you're saying, but people that get it, it's like you can dip your toothbrush all day long in some creek

and brush your teeth, and, you know, anyone that dips their toothbrush in a creek usually knows not to, they spit it all out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The people that get it, and I've gotten it, and when I've gotten it, you're able to look and be like you were drinking volumes of water i don't know that anyone that picked up cryptosporidia or giardia that couldn't look and and figure out what like couldn't look and and sort of isolate a situation where they made a stupid call like do you hear of patients coming in or people coming in with Giardia

and having no idea how they could have possibly gotten it? Haven't been camping? You don't go fishing and wind up with Giardia. No, that's true. But going fishing is entering the great wild world where you are associated with something or other. I mean, where do you go fishing and don't have lunch on the bank of the river or the

lake or something? You're going to stop for lunch or you're going to cook up some fish. And in so doing, you've maybe brought some other stuff around. Usually, I agree with you, it's a larger quantity. It's a glass of water. Or the people in Milwaukee who had it piped through in their town system is that right really and this is this this was the biggest single outbreak of crypto this is crypto now but they're almost a parallel in the way they affect you okay in history in the municipal water

system will supply oh I got Milwaukee and they all had beaver fever right in town oh the experts were there and of of course, the lab people weren't trained to look for crypto. They were looking for bacteria. And they did every test for bacteria under the sun. They said, we can't find anything in there. And eventually, it was a hot summer day. And it was up to five, sorry, about 50,000 illnesses, cases, and something like 5,000 deaths. This is a big outbreak.

When was this? I'm surprised you never heard about it. Oh. Oh, I can get you the exact date when they get back to you. I think I remember some kind of listeria outbreak or something like that. No, listeria is always much smaller than that, but more deadly. Anyway, this particular thing, they had a big press conference, and the reporters were there, and the commissioner for health, I forget his name now, Schmidt or something like that,

one of the reporters said, oh, Dr. Schmidt, we noticed that you're not drinking your water on the press table, you know. And he said, well, to tell the truth, a couple of boys in the lab think that might be something to do with the water, but we're not sure yet. Now, up to that point, they thought it was food. Yeah. And so the lawyers went to town and said, look, if you think it's something to do with water, at least tell us and we'll boil the water until you find out what the hell is going on. It was very embarrassing. This was in 1993. Oh, good.

Yeah, early 90s. I was just out of high school. Modern times. 800,000 people were exposed to it. No. Exposure was huge, yeah, because it was coming through the safe water supply, you know, drinking fountains, school kids. Wow. Man.

And again, that's a parasite that resists the chlorination that we normally apply. So you've got to have an extra special chlorine or extra special filtration. So back to somebody that's out camping. Out camping. And they stop. But hold on. Can I hit one more before you do that? Did you watch that documentary about that colt in Oregon called Wild Wild?

Was it Wild Wild Country or Wild Country? Wild Wild Country. Wild Wild Country. Wild Wild Country. Anyway, there's a documentary about this cult in Oregon. And they had it where they're trying to figure out a way to keep everybody from voting on a certain day. They didn't want the townspeople to vote because they wanted to be able to dominate an election.

So they think, like, how can we get, what would prevent everybody from voting? And they feel that what would prevent everybody from voting is that everyone were sick. Oh, jeez. And they experiment like, how can we get, what would prevent everybody from voting? And they, they feel that what would prevent everybody from voting is everyone were sick. Oh, and they experimented their experiment with various, they were going into salad bars. It was like a popular restaurant in town.

And they went and tried to like contaminate a salad bar and effectively didn't got a bunch of people sick. But another thing they knew about the new story. No, it's true story. Yeah. The Rajneeshies. So they knew about beaver fever, but they didn't quite know what beaver fever was they

thought that somehow like beavers had carried beaver fever and they they didn't execute on this but i think they toyed with this plan to catch beavers and then blend the beavers up and contaminate the municipal water supply with blended up beavers in order to infect the townspeople so that on election day only the rajneeshis would vote it's a great story anyway go ahead yanni thank you for that take a big blender a big blender go get me a beaver and a beaver blender. Beaver blender. And the reason I'm bringing up this instance,

because I've been there and I've had, and I can't quite remember now what he, he's a chemical engineer, I believe, but a scientist nonetheless. And when I sat there and went through pumping my water, treating it, and I was actually using one of these Nalgene bottles just like this one. Now I would put my one end right into the creek there, the water source. And it sort of has like a real rough filter at that end.

And it kind of has a float to keep it up off the bottom. And so you stay away from the sediment. Goes in one tube, goes through the filter. And then there's sort of, there's a ceramic filter, right? No, it wasn't a ceramic version. It was just the catadine, the regular filter, but not a ceramic version. And then you put the little attachment that

fits nice and snug on your Nalgene bottle. You proceed to pump away. Oh, it's a reverse osmosis then? Yes. Okay, with the pressure. Yeah. Through a membrane. Yes, it's a reverse osmosis then? Yes. Okay, with the pressure. Yeah. Through a membrane. Yes, exactly.

You pump it full. And then when it's all said and done, I would take my water filtration system and there's long tubes going both directions and I would wrap it up and put it back into my little pouch that it lives in, put it into my backpack, and off we go. And he felt that because I'm not keeping the whole system clean and that in the end I'm sort of contaminating the whole system because that one end that goes into the water source is now stuck in a bag.

And you splash little droplets of water in there. He's like, you know what? If you're going to do that, there's really no reason for us to sit here and spend all this time filtering the water. Bullshit, man. It's got to be some kind of parts per million, man. The whole world would have Giardia. Aren't there parts of the world

that where a great percentage of people have it? In poor areas, yeah. Like the north of Canada where they're living in like a third world area for sure. Wells and sewage all get a bit mixed up together, that kind of thing for sure. But let's just say with the water again because you had mentioned about water treatment systems. If you're looking for a system, reverse osmosis is not a bad system, but it's got some real problems with it. When it's working out of the manufacturer and it fits NSF certified to be one micron, it's got to be absolute.

It says on it, absolute one micron. Then it's been tested by the National Sanitation Foundation. It has been found not to pass anything greater than one micron. So you're going to keep out crypto and Giardia. And viruses too, right? At one micron? No. No? Much smaller. Much smaller.

Even some of the bacteria will get through at one micron. But if you're just looking at these particular nasties, if it says nominal one micron don't trust it sometimes 20-30% of this crypto will get through with nominal it's just like approximately so go with your absolute

the other thing with RO is it works very well until the membrane which is a semi-permeable membrane until that gets even a microscopic hole in it which it will do after a while it's a biological membrane so you get a little fungus growing and little pin hole in it, which it will do after a while. It's a biological membrane. So you get a little fungus growing in it, little pinholes in it,

and there's no way to tell that what is getting through is in fact contaminated. So they normally say use an RO filter with something downstream from it, like ozone or a little drop of chlorine or something in there as well, just to be sure that there's something in there. Same with the ultraviolet light.

Do you remember for a while with little ultraviolet light kits you could get? That's what we use now. We use those. That's all we use now. That's all we use. Now, the problem with ultraviolet is that it forms a deposit on the tube.

You know, if you have a tube within the tube, if it's one of those. Yeah, a tube within a tube. If you take it out once in a while, you don't clean the inner tube. There's all kinds of kind of a caking on the inner tube, which means that your UV now doesn't reach the water. And there's no way to tell. So what you should do is either clean that inner tube rigorously every time or make sure there's something downstream like chlorine or iodine or something like that or ozone, which will polish off anything that's got by.

Yeah, we're big SteriPEN guys. Really? Yeah, that's good. That's the product with the name of it. Yeah, we love it. It runs on like a CR123 battery. Yeah, or AA's. They have both.

Yeah, that's right. I like those. Hey, how does iodine kill stuff? Well, it's a molecule, an element, actually, that when in combination with proteins, it forms another very pleasant situation. This is why iodine was the first thing that you dab on. You remember in the old days? Oh, sure, man. Your mom and dad dumping that red stuff on you all the time. It wasn't the iodine was the first thing that you dab on. You remember in the old days? Oh, for sure, man. Your mom and dad dumping that red stuff on you all the time?

It wasn't the iodine that hurt. It was the alcohol that goes in because it was the tincture of iodine. Okay. But nowadays you use betadine and these other things which you can put on. It doesn't hurt as much. So you go for an operation. They put on that nice red stuff, let it dry, and then they cut into you. But it's an iodophore or an iodine complicated organic iodine compound. It's just

that it kills off most bacteria. Most bacteria can't survive in it. But it's okay to, like, because here's the thing, like, you know, guys in the military, they use a lot of iodine for water sanitation in the field. So, using iodine tablets. And then they make a neutralizer that neutralizes the flavor of iodine. Yeah. But it's, it's a commonly held belief. I don't know if it's true or not. Like in our circles, it's a commonly held belief that if you're spending a ton of time out, you shouldn't be eating, you shouldn't be using iodine because you're drinking all this, you're drinking too much iodine.

The only place in your, in the, your body that will hang on to iodine is your thyroid gland. No other tissue has got a receptor point for it. So anything more than that, you're urinating, you're defecated straight out. So you can't really do much. I believe there is a threshold for too much iodine. It sort of plays hell with the irritation in some parts of the system and also can give too much in the thyroid gland, but it's not going to be something that's going

to affect you too much. So if you spend a couple months out of the year out running around the woods... It's the taste that most people don't like. So there's no detrimental... I mean, again, not every day all day, but a week here and there drinking iodine-treated water is okay. Let me talk to our occupational health people who are linked in with OSHA and NIOSH and

so on, just to see what the latest is on, on excessive iodine and what is excessive. I mean, it's got to be several ounces of iodine or something. Was he just a little more? Let me find out that and I can, I can forward that information to you. Yeah. When I was talking earlier about, I got, I got two more GR or two more like water. Because remember salt's got iodine in because we need to you. Yeah. When I was talking earlier about, I got two more waterborne. Because remember, salt's got iodine in, because we need iodine.

Yeah. They put iodine in salt because they figure it's mass medication, but it's the one thing you could guarantee that everybody's going to have a little bit of salt in their year, their month, their week. My two remaining questions on giardia and krypton, other waterborne stuff that you get

when you're camping uh back to my one point like i've had it two or three times um and when when like i remember one time i could take you to where i drank out of a creek rabbit hunting back home in michigan and got real sick and then i got it one time in arizona because i did iodine but i didn't want to while super thirsty and i didn't want to wait for the iodine tablet to dissolve and everybody else thought it was really stupid and i had some argument why i thought it was okay got sick uh i remember my brother him getting it real bad one time because we were elk hunting, and we thought we found a trickle, the original source where it's coming out of the ground,

and he drank a bunch of that. And then we went another 10 yards up the hill and realized that it was a big elk wallow, and it hadn't flown through enough sand to filter it out. And I remember he got sick, and it went on and on and on. Eventually got treated. So like the times when we've had it and then were diagnosed because of, of given a scat sample, um,

have, have again, it's been these times where, when you like get sick, you're like, oh man, did I make a bad move? I remember another time,

a bunch of us got sick in Colorado. Someone had told us that some river was for some magical reason didn't have it everybody drank everybody colorado's a hot spot is it really and it was just like all these moments where you could kind of go through your history over the last couple weeks and sort of identify you know a moment where it came from so to yannis like driving after mainly i'm driving after yannis's point where when i hear people talk about that you know you dip some water out of a creek and then you starry pen the inside of your bottle how maybe you missed a little drop in the threads of the bottle i don't know man i just don't i just can't i just feel like if that

stuff was getting you, then everybody would be sick all the damn time. It's a probability game, really, on how many cells you're taking in. And all those things we've talked about, whether it's tularemia and toxoplasma and so on, there's a minimum number of cells you need to get ill. Okay. Some of these things you need half a million or three equals a million to get ill. Other things, half a dozen will do it. Gotcha. So it

already depends on what the density is in the water. And probably your fitness or your wellness, right? To some degree, or your immune system. Let's call it that. How strong your immune system is. For example, if you're pretty ill from some other underlying feature, or you've got diabetes or something, maybe your immune system is down. You're going to

be hit much harder than other people. So, here's my second question. Were communities or groups of First Nations peoples, Native American, Native Alaskans, did they eventually develop an immunity to it? And did all of their children have to go through a phase of having Giardia? That is a really good question. And we've had the same thing asked about things like salmonella in Mexico, for example, or in Southeast Asia, where there's a lot of it around. But people don't seem to suffer from it anywhere near as much

as the tourist who goes there and is exposed. We know that, just before I leave salmonella a little bit, we know that salmonella typhi, which causes a rather strange form of salmonella we call typhoid fever, which is a very serious disease. I didn't know that that was even connected. It's called salmonella typhi. That particular organism, we haven't,

we've had a vaccine. I've been vaccinated for that when I used to live in the Mediterranean, typhoid fever and paratyphoid fever. So the other salmonella probably do.

We even think there's a link like that, a kind of an acquired immunity among local people with Staphylococcus aureus, the staph toxin you get, you know? Yeah. There's not an organism, the organism produces aureus, the Staph toxin you get. There's not an organism.

The organism produces the toxin. We eat the toxin. Even that appears that some people might actually become not immune to it but tolerant of it, more tolerant of it. They wouldn't suffer from it. And so travelers coming back from the nice North American city, their stomach is used to North American supermarket food. They go and travel in Thailand or Philippines or somewhere like that, and they suddenly are really ill.

The local people are eating it all the time. I don't know about Giardia, specifically about that, but it's such a good question. I want to find out and get back to you about that because I want to see if there's any evidence so far that we can become more tolerant of Giardia. I think it's a really good bet that we do good so hang on that because we're going to wrap it up and i'm going to let you go because now we have occasion to have you back on and provide us the answer about um how native americansed with Giardia.

Good? Sounds good. What do you guys got? You got any concluders? I just want to make sure that I'm clear that my takeaway is that it is okay for me to go out there and eat as much fresh or saltwater fish raw. Really, the worst thing. He wants you to write it down that it's okay. The worst thing that's going to happen to me is that I'm going to end up with a little worm

that crawls through my stomach and worms around for up to a week or so and then dies. In the kind of fish that we're going to be exposed to in North America, yes. That's about right. Okay. So ceviche, there's a number of societies around the world who do the same thing. Oddly enough, they call it cooking in lime. It's because the appearance of the fish, you know, it looks like it's cooked. Oh, yeah, man.

It's very opaque. But it's not actually being cooked. I think that like most of the chlorine or anything else, it's the time and the dose. So it's the strength of the Lyme and how long it's been in there to achieve a kill-off of anything that is in there. But even if it wasn't much in there, what you're saying is still true. You're not going to have any serious disease. You may have some little tickle in the throat. You may get a little puncture in the intestine.

If you're really rare, you might get a peritonitis, but that's so rare that it hits the medical books when it happens. So it's not a big deal. Oh, it's rare enough that people write about it when it happens? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good measure of rarity. It's like when someone gets hit by a mountain lion, it makes national news. You're like, not many people are getting hit by mountain lions.

Yeah, very true. Unless the mountain lion had a toxoplasma in it, you know. Yeah, that's another kind of mountain lion problem. Sam, what do you got? Oh, I mean, there's so many more diseases I want to talk about from this incredible list you gave us. We're not going to get through them all. I just want to –

If I thought we had a chance to get through them all, I would plow ahead. I know. But it's got to be a TB. It's to be continued, man. It's like how Dukes of Hazzard. I understand. I'm just so fascinated now. and I'm struggling with kind of

dueling emotions that like I feel like authorized to go eat whatever fish I went to Rob but I'm also like scared to death now about a bunch of other shit so but I wouldn't do that in Southeast Asia I wasn't planning on it fish and crab and shrimp cook there. Yeah. I mean, there was a thing in Hong Kong a number of years ago, and I was with people who do that, who they would bring live shrimp to the table, and you pick them up with the chopsticks, and maybe you dunk them quickly into the hot soup, but they're still basically alive. Eat them.

Yeah, there was a handful. They loved that. Not a handful. There was a place in LA I went to, and the whole point there is like eating stuff still basically alive. Eat them. Yeah, there's a handful. They love that. Not a handful. There's a place in LA I went to and the whole special, the whole point there is like eating stuff that's alive. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, people eat raw oysters. Oysters you eat live, yeah. But there's more stuff. They're bringing all this stuff out. It's like the whole thing is, oh, it's still alive. Isn't that great? And in an oyster,

if you look really closely before you eat it, there's all kinds of little worms in there, but they don't cause any problem at all. Look at it closely. Yeah, worms, I don't know if you look really closely before you eat it, there's all kinds of little worms in there, but they don't cause any problem at all. Look at it closely. Yeah, worms, I don't know if you ever flayed a bluegill or a perch. A lot of them look like someone, yeah, it looks like someone put black pepper on them already. I don't tell my wife, I'm like, see that?

That's a couple hundred little worms. Make sure it's properly cooked. That's a parasite. No, I'm just like, yeah, they just look like that. I don't know what that is. What they do is in some places in Europe and England, they take a haddock, a sea fish, and they smoke it. It's called smoked haddock. But the worms now take on more of the dye than the fish does.

So at last, anybody looking at it can say, oh, there's a little cold up because it's dark amber color. And the rest of the fish is light amber color. But it's dead. It's been properly cooked. Hey, you don't have a book or anything, do you? I'm writing a couple of things. Yeah. So if people are listening and they want to check out, I mean, you probably publish academically, right?

Oh, academically publishing. Yeah. I'm a writer on Quora now. I'm retired from full-time teaching, but I still do some teaching around the world. So people can look up Tim Sly. Tim Sly Ryerson, and you'll get all kinds of epidemiologists, and people will find your work, and they'll read your stuff. I read a great deal of his writings, completely unrelated to even anything I was writing about, and your responses on Quora always have a good tongue and cheek component that I enjoyed quite a bit. Well, thank you very much for coming

on. Thank you, Steve. I'd love to have you back. We only got through about a third of the things a fella could run into. We haven't touched on babesiosis, brucellosis. I'd never even heard of that one. Campylobacteriosis. Babesiosis.

Anaplasmosis. Anaplasmosis. Stay tuned, folks. We're going to cover a lot more diseases that will kill you. Thanks again. Good stuff. Pleasure. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this.

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