Featured Image Credit: @EM_RESUS/Twitter/Getty Stock Image
Topics: Food and Drink
Gerrard Kaonga
A doctor has revealed what can happen to a person if they eat raw pork in a disturbing explanation on social media.
Now accidentally undercooking your chicken or steak and not noticing before you take a bite can be forgiven, however, making sure you are cooking your food properly cannot be overstated enough as the consequences of failing to do so can truly be horrifying.
Be it food poisoning from salmonella or E.Coli from things like eating raw chicken - even for a weird experiment - it can sometimes be incredibly dangerous, but at least with those health conditions, you know when you've fallen ill as an ER doctor since has taken to Twitter to explain what can happen to a person if they become infected with a parasite underneath their skin from eating raw pork.
And it's just as grim as you'd imagine.
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Doctor Sam Ghali shared an X-ray onto his social media account and explained what exactly people were looking at.
It is clearly a shot of a person’s pelvis, and the bones appear completely normal for the most part but one concerning detail is the appearance of white blotches scattered all over the person’s body.
In the video, he explained: “What is jumping right off the screen at us here is this film is riddled with these linear densities, and they are everywhere. So what the hell are they?
“This is a condition known as cysticercosis, essentially these are larval cyst of taenia solium, also known as the pork tapeworm.”
Ghali explained that the life cycle of the tapeworm was complex but went on to explain just how they would cause a person to have this massive breakout.
He said: “I will just say, the life cycle begins with a human consuming raw or undercooked pig and then that person becomes infected with the worms in their GI tract and passes the eggs along to another unfortunate human who then consumes them.
“These cysts can travel anywhere throughout the entire body, heavily to the muscular and soft tissue of the hips and the legs.”
The eggs then calcified in the body, which is why they look like white splotches.
Explaining that this person's infection was only caught after they'd suffered a fracture, Ghali went on to say that at this part of the body they don’t actually pose a life threatening problem, but problems occur when they travel to the brain.
According to Cleveland Clinic, if there are a lot of cysts, then it can put pressure on the brain, which can cause inflammation that could lead to swelling and seizures, headaches and other neurological conditions - or even death.
A doctor in China who did see the cysts travel to a person’s brain explained just how debilitating they can be for a person.
Professor Meng Qiang, chief physician of the Department of Neurology at the Provincial First Hospital said: “Parasitic worms have the greatest impact on the brain and affect the central nervous system.
“The most common one is epilepsy, and it may also cause intellectual impairment. Some patients may also experience limb paralysis, language dysfunction, sensory impairment, etc."
So, if you do consume pork probably best to make sure that the meat is cooked thoroughly through.