Recently, there have been rumors in the circle of friends, and the news that has been refuted has been repackaged and re-entered the stage. This time the gun was laid on pork, and the content was the “pork hookworm disease” that was once popular in July. However, this time, the target of the rumor has changed from pork from Sichuan and Hebei to pork from Guangdong and Guangxi.
The content on the Internet is roughly as follows: hookworms appear in a large area of pork in such and such areas. This parasite [cannot be boiled in water, fried in oil, and killed at high temperature] is accompanied by fuzzy pictures of hookworms.
The pictures in the rumor cannot present hookworms!
Due to the pixel problem, the author really can’t tell whether it is pig’s nerve, blood vessel, fascia or other what things, but this thing is 100%, it can never be hookworm!
There are two main reasons.
First, hookworms are not so long. Even the adult hookworms are generally only about 1cm long. Filamentous metacercariae are even shorter, even less than 1mm long.
Second, the parasitic site is wrong. Parasites are mostly very picky about the host and parasitic site. If they parasitize in the wrong place, they cannot develop into adults. The place where hookworms can mature is in the digestive tract, muscle tissue and adipose tissue. How can there be hookworm adults?
What is a hookworm?
In fact, hookworm is a general term for hookworm, which has many families and genera, including at least 17 genera and about 100 species. At present, there are 7 genera reported in China, most of which are parasitic in mammals.
There are mainly two kinds of hookworms that affect human health, [hookworms duodenum] and [Bankworms americana].
Hookworms usually infect people in the form of filamentous cercariae at the larval stage. They will use the opportunity of people’s field work to penetrate into human skin from soil, enter blood vessels or lymphatic vessels, and then circulate with the body and migrate to the intestinal wall to parasitize.
If people are unfortunately parasitized by hookworm, they may get hookworm disease.
Parasites in Pork
Objectively speaking, pigs are indeed important hosts for many parasites. However, compared with consumers, it is actually a problem that breeders should worry about more.
As I said just now, parasites are mostly very picky about [hosts] and [parasitic parts], so parasites on pigs do not necessarily infect people. Moreover, most parasites have the ability to infect only when they are eggs or larvae. After becoming adults, if they leave the host, they can only die.
However, there are also parasites that can infect people through pork, of which the most noticeable one is the famous Taenia solium.
Taenia solium is different from hookworm. It can grow very long, about 2 ~ 4 meters, and looks a bit like wide powder.
People are both their main [final host] and their [intermediate host], while pigs are their important intermediate hosts.
If people or pigs eat food with tapeworms or eggs, then these eggs are likely to grow into cysticercus in various tissues of the body. However, if people eat pork with cysticercus, this cysticercus will have the opportunity to develop into an adult in the human body.
Can pork be eaten safely?
Of course.
First of all, not all pigs are infected with parasites.
Secondly, there is no kind of parasite that has practiced the golden bell jar iron cloth shirt to reach the state of [boiling is not rotten, frying is not ripe, and high temperature cannot kill].
Although some people like to eat marine fish and beef raw or half-raw (in fact, there are risks in doing so), most people have only one way to eat pork: well-cooked.
Heating is the most effective and common way to eliminate parasites and parasite eggs. As long as pork slaughtered through regular channels is purchased in the regular market, it is safe to cook properly.
So now the question arises, is it better to eat braised pork or Hui Guo pork tonight?