When I was a child we were warned – over & over – NEVER eat pork which is undercooked. Or you will get a TAPEWORM, which will live in your gut & EAT YOU UP. Pigs, fed on swill (including the leftovers from our school dinners), tended to harbour these frightening things.
I don’t know if today’s foodie has the same taste for undercooked pork as they have for lamb – modern animal hygiene seems to have abolished the tapeworm threat.
But last week, under a headline worthy of the Daily Mail, the Times warned of a new danger - from dogs:
Change in EU pet travel law will expose Britain to liver disease that kills humans
Written by Environment Editor Ben Webster, it tells of a threat that comes from untreated dogs harbouring a small tapeworm which can cause a nasty disease which goes under the abbreviated name of AE, from which hundreds of people in mainland Europe have died in the last ten years.
Not, I assume, from eating dogs – they have other ways of transmitting the bug.
Sources for the story include the president of the British Veterinary Association, a veterinary pathologist from the Wildlife Veterinary Investigation Centre & the British Association for Shooting & Conservation, who have been lobbying the European Commission to allow the UK to keep the regulation which demands that dogs coming to this country must have been wormed.
The vets will just have to hope for a satisfactory outcome to the negotiations between our Environment Department, the Commission & its expert consultants.
