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Categorize this one as gross but true. After presidential candidate RFK, Jr. recently shared that he had a dead pork tapeworm removed from his brain, we’re seeing a lot of questions on this. Yes, you can get parasites in your brain. The pork tapeworm is usually spread from eating undercooked meat (or food prepared by someone who did) and then larvae moving from the intestines to the brain. A more common brain parasite, toxoplasmosis, affects a huge percentage of Americans - over one in ten of us! That one can be foodborne as well, also spread via undercooked meat, though many people have no symptoms at all because our immune systems are effective at preventing illness. Still, severe illness from brain parasites is relatively rare. If this gives you the heebie-jeebies, take solace - properly cooking meat and practicing strong food safety skills are the best ways to avoid these types of brain parasites.
We know that there’s no risk to humans from eggs if they’re “safely handled and properly cooked,” according to the USDA. The handling part is standard for restaurants, including proper storage temperatures. But the “properly cooked” part is a conundrum for runny eggs since the CDC says both the white and yolk should be cooked until firm. The most cautious answer is to thoroughly cook your eggs, but in reality, we’ve been dealing with this particular H5N1 outbreak in birds for 2 straight years, and millions of people have been eating them with runny yolks for that entire time. Unlike with cows, poultry farms have well-established testing procedures and federal inspection, and the birds themselves have a very rapid onset of H5N1, so it’s unlikely that eggs from sick birds enter our food supply. In short, there is some risk, but that risk is very, very low right now and not very different right now than it has been for the past few years. Consumer advisories about undercooked eggs are already in place on most menus, as well.
In theory, absolutely. We know that there are virus fragments in a significant amount of the U.S. milk supply. That’s not a danger to the average person because most of us buy pasteurized milk at the grocery store, which has been heated briefly to kill dangerous pathogens, including bird flu. But raw milk may contain live virus, and that means it could infect those drinking it. Notably, officials studied cats on two dairy farms where cats drank raw milk from cows infected with H5N1. Within just a few days of the cows getting sick, the cats did, too - and half died. And while the milk from sick cows is supposed to be discarded, there’s very strong evidence that there is widespread asymptomatic transmission - meaning a farmer can’t know from looking at a cow if that cow is sick, and therefore won’t know to throw out her milk. In theory, someone drinking raw milk could get sick and possibly spread the virus to their family and friends, so it’s best to skip the raw milk for now and in general. Raw milk is dangerous for reasons beyond this bird flu - it can contain pathogens like Campylobacter, E. coli, and Listeria that can be deadly, especially for people and kids with weaker immune systems.