HIV and ID Observations

From the pages of the New York Times, courtesy of ProMED, comes this case report:

An Australian man has been hospitalized for more than a month in serious condition as a result of eating two garden slugs on a dare…The 21-year-old Sydney man apparently contracted a rat lungworm parasite from the slugs, which pick it up from rodent droppings. The parasite, a nematode called Angiostrongylus cantonensis, can cause fatal brain swelling.

From the perspective of an Infectious Diseases doctor, the surprising thing isn’t that a person would actually eat a raw garden slug — or even, as in this case, eat two raw garden slugs. After all, in our field one regularly hears of risk-taking behavior that, to quote a particular novel, “… runs to Z and beyond!”

Nope — my favorite part of the case report is this line:

“We hope this will help to remind others to avoid eating raw slugs,” the moderator, Eskild Petersen, said.

And with that, Public Health Crisis averted.