Feral pig meat transmits rare bacteria
arstechnica.com178 points by abawany 9 months ago
larusso - 8 months ago
It’s somewhat scary that it still can take years to find the route cause for these kinds of infections. Two years back I had a month stretch in stomach pains. The worst I ever had. I had this on and off for 2-4 years. Happened once a year and was gone. I went to multiple doctors and did bloodtests etc. I then had a Colonoscopy and Gastroscopy. They want some scared tissue in my duodenum. Reason was some bacteria or fungi which they where then able to test for. Wich is funny because they did all kinds of bloodtests before … Long story short, I received a special antibiotic and everything was fine. My theory was that I eat something problematic while being in Egypt around 2018.
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Tade0 - 8 months ago
Sometimes it's "just" helicobacter pylori.
I had a particularly widespread infection a while ago, so my GP prescribed Amoxicillin.
Suddenly the stomach pains, which used to be a regular thing for me whenever I ate something hard to digest, disappeared altogether.
Turns out this antibiotic is part of the concoction they have you take to deal with stomach ulcers, as it deals with the bacteria responsible for them.
I have no confirmation that was indeed the case here aside from a previously diagnosed chronic doudendum inflammation, but the difference was night and day, so this is my working theory.
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petre - 8 months ago
You also need a proton pump inhibitor taken one hour before the antibiotic and before food for a more effective treatment.
The chronic duodenum inflamation could also be linked to gut microbiota depletion. I had mild lactose intolerance for years until I took probiotics for a few months and started eating whole milk youghurt (as unfermented milk the question) as part of my regular diet. It needs to be real yoghurt, not the phony sweeter one with corn starch, sugar or fruit added to it. Also UHT milk might screw up your gut microbiota. Make sure you take probiotics during and after the antibiotic treatment.
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AStonesThrow - 8 months ago
Seconding this.
I'm unsure of interactions between antibiotics and detrimental gut flora such as Candida albicans, but Western medicine pretends that doesn’t exist anyway
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Tade0 - 8 months ago
> but Western medicine pretends that doesn’t exist anyway
What do mean by that? The leaflet for my tablets against throat infections specifically mentions candida strains taking over as a risk when overdoing the drug.
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genewitch - 8 months ago
I've heard of Candida infections before. I also know what preem probiotics are and antibiotics, but what's a detrimental gut flora and how do you get rid of it?
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jmalicki - 8 months ago
Gut flora are just the bacteria that live in your gut.
Some are good (e.g. what you take probiotics to get more of), others are detrimental (e.g. h. Pylori, candida)
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AStonesThrow - 8 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candida_albicans
Candida is not microbial. Candida is a genus of fungus [yeast].
Gut fungus is in an entirely different class of treatment; antibiotics will not eradicate fungi, and fungus tends to grow tendrils and spores and generally work into every moist/dark crevice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori#Treatment
Bacteria can be vanquished by digesting antimicrobials, but viruses are simpler/smaller, and fungus ain’t even in the same kingdom.
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genewitch - 8 months ago
I understand all of this; what i meant to ask, i think, is: How do these detrimental gut flora get in to our systems, and how do we prevent that, or get rid of them? Is taking more bacteria helpful, in that it can out-compete the fungus? My experience with lacto and yeast is that both of those are well-equipped to outcompete nearly everything, especially if you give them lots of pure sugar.
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petre - 8 months ago
That's why you take fluconazole with your first dose of antibiotic.
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AStonesThrow - 8 months ago
Man, I ran a plan of some mental anagrams on that drug word, and all that’s missing is an “i”
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petre - 8 months ago
I read about a guy getting iraquibacter from desert dust in Egypt and getting treated with phage therapy by his wife. Needless to say I'll avoid Egypt.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/08/health/phage-superbug-killer-...
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skellera - 8 months ago
That’s an amazing story. The wife really gathered together all the right people to create a phage treatment to save her husband’s life. Great job on all the doctors and scientists that figured out how to make it so quickly.
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AStonesThrow - 8 months ago
To my intense interest recently, I learned that the word sarcophagus literally means “eater of flesh” and indeed has Eucharistic connotation, but of course most commonly applied to Pharaonic caskets.
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Marsymars - 8 months ago
There’s a book too: https://theperfectpredator.com/
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hackyhacky - 8 months ago
Which antibiotic did they give you?
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cpgxiii - 8 months ago
It could have been Rifaximin (brand name Xifaxan), which is a somewhat standard "special" antibiotic for gut issues.
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larusso - 8 months ago
Uff sorry would need to check. It’s been a few years already since I got the treatment.
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mertleee - 8 months ago
After having a seemingly "random" bout of cdiff after receiving a highly potent antibiotic for a "random" salivary gland infection - colonoscopies and antibiotics really scare me.
I believe the salivary gland infection was a result of some non-covid illness I had that may have been linked to some odd vaccine side effect or my tanked immune system.
Gut stuff is so important.
kragen - 8 months ago
The clickbait headline should be replaced by one that somewhere mentions the word "brucellosis", because that's what he had. We aren't talking about exotica like meningococcemia, ehrlichiosis, or meloidosis here.
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dillydogg - 8 months ago
There are between 100-200 cases of brucellosis in the US each year, so I would call that rare. It's common worldwide, but not where this patient lives. Also, the species of Brucella is a less common one in the US. Erlichiosis is closer to 1000 per year.
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donnachangstein - 8 months ago
A lot of things that are rare in the US, e.g. trichinosis, are still endemic in Europe. Something like > 50% of pigs in Eastern Europe are infected while there are < 20 human cases per year in the US because of better agricultural standards. Part of the reason you can eat a medium rare pork chop in the US and not die. I love bacon.
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TheSpiceIsLife - 8 months ago
2021 data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control:
Bulgaria and Croatia had the highest rates of trichinellosis at 0.42 cases per 100,000 population, accounting for 58% of all cases reported in 2021. Taking those two countries gether and extrapolateing to whole US population of 3400 hundred thousand (340 million) would be 1428 cases - definitely much higher that <20, which would be something like 0.0002 per 100,000.
The total number of reported infections in 2021 was 79 cases for the whole European Union / European Economic Area was 79 cases for a total population of 4500 hundred thousand (450 million), an infection rate of 0.02 cases per 100,000.
Discounting the two worst countries would reduce the number to about 40 cases per 4500 hundred thousand population would bring the rate of infection to something like 0.008 - not entirely too far from the US.
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/AER...
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hn_throwaway_99 - 8 months ago
> you can eat a medium rare pork chop
Wut? Do people really do that? I would assume "medium rare" for a pork chop would mean that some of the meat would still be pink, and I personally would never even think of eating pork that wasn't cooked all the way through.
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jmalicki - 8 months ago
You know you're getting the meat from a specific farm with higher standards, and cooked by someone who is very aware and good at cooking it long enough to kill pathogens but still be pink. Sous vide or slow cooking are very popular here, since you can be very confident the internal temperature of the meat was high enough to kill any pathogens, but not high enough to brown the meat
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hn_throwaway_99 - 8 months ago
Thanks for the info, will have to try the sous vide method sometime.
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6177c40f - 8 months ago
I do that. Cook it to an internal temp of about 145 F (about 63 C). That's hot enough to kill Trichinella in an under a minute (as well as other pathogens), but the meat will still be pale pink and juicy. I've only done this with American supermarket pork though, so experiences may vary.
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dyauspitr - 8 months ago
Who eats medium rare pork in the US? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.
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donnachangstein - 8 months ago
Try ordering a pork chop at a fancy steakhouse sometime. Pork in the US only needs to be cooked to 145F to be safe per USDA. Despite this, people would willingly destroy a high quality pork chop but not think twice about eating raw oysters or runny eggs, both of which are far more risky.
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MillironX - 8 months ago
Maybe semantics, but Brucella suis isn't a "rare bacteria," it's a rare cause of a rare (human) disease in the US. B. suis is endemic in feral pig populations.
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kragen - 8 months ago
It's kind of rare, just not in the way I was hoping for when the headline tricked me into clicking it.
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ikr678 - 8 months ago
Its rare in Australia too, but well known and memed about in hunting communities (one symptom is painfull swelling in the genitals).
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ttyprintk - 8 months ago
I feel like in the case of bacterial meningitis, they would have. Would you rather see, “Brucellosis hits goat farmer, but not from where you expect!”
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bigstrat2003 - 8 months ago
The headline would be far less meaningful for most people if it said that. The vast majority of people would have no idea what "brucellosis" even is.
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kragen - 8 months ago
You generally don't make utterances less understandable by adding words.
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bigstrat2003 - 8 months ago
It was definitely not clear to me that you just wanted to add words. I took you as meaning that you wanted the headline to be "Feral pig must transmits brucellosis", which would be significantly less clear.
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kragen - 8 months ago
I also do not think "Brucellosis brucellosis. Brucellosis? Brucellosis BRUCELLOSIS brucellosis." would be an improvement. In fact, the vast majority of possible titles containing the word would be less clear, such as "hotel areas case play brucellosis central particularly big them" or "eight these human therefore seem working gives brucellosis services".
But an implicit subtext of my suggestion was to pick a title that is clearer rather than less clear.
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labster - 8 months ago
There are words that add ambiguity to sentences, like “quite” and 「ちょっと」(chotto), but names of diseases are not that.
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kragen - 8 months ago
There are definitely exceptions. For example, I think "You generally don't grating's make utterances less menfolk's understandable by adding words" is less understandable than my original comment. But that's a sort of thing people rarely do.
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wirrbel - 8 months ago
ah, thanks, that isn't extremely exotic.
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dbcooper - 8 months ago
♫ The cattle all have brucellosis, We'll get through somehow ♫
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pfdietz - 8 months ago
Thank you, Warren.
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kazinator - 8 months ago
> Though he couldn’t recall the specific hunter who gave him the biohazardous bounty, he remembered handling the raw meat and blood with his bare hands—a clear transmission risk—before cooking and eating it.
Well, of course he could perfectly recall, but he's not going to rat out his friend.
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Zuider - 8 months ago
In the USA, it is open season on feral swine all year around, no permit required, as they are a very noxious pest. In Texas, you can even go heli-hogging!
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kazinator - 8 months ago
Right; I didn't think the friend did anything illegal by hunting feral pigs.
Still; someone might call him asking questions, which is trouble enough, and who knows where that might lead.
Our first instinct should be to protect everyone in our circle from even the slightest hassle.
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ekelsen - 8 months ago
Or he was the hunter?
a3w - 8 months ago
Was the 'a zombie outbreak game making-of-video' placed in the middle of this article on purpose, or by automatic CMS?
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Nextgrid - 8 months ago
Ars seems to have succumbed to this dumbass US trend of putting a random video 3 lines into any news article, since clearly 3 lines is too much for today's attention spans.
Edit: it may be a fallback for an ad, according to this forum thread? https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/ars-video-callisto-pro... Still stupid though - so the user is already costing you money by blocking ads, so how about we waste 10x the money in bandwidth serving up a pointless video?
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xorcist - 8 months ago
Ars is perfectly usable without Javascript. Either use Noscript or click the uBo shield and deselect the script tag.
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dharmab - 8 months ago
At this point I have uBo disable JS by default and bound a hotkey to turn it on as needed.
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jdthedisciple - 8 months ago
This should help everyone understand a little better the origins - or perhaps wisdoms - of the pork taboo which was discussed here recently [0]:
Pigs are simply a potpourri of all sorts of bacteria that you don't want in you.
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swampthing - 8 months ago
That's not at all the conclusion of the article you linked to. In fact, that theory is discounted by it.
> Price points out, however, that none of these theories fully accounts for the taboo. Pig-rearing, after all, had existed for thousands of years in the region, even in times of drought, and many types of meat can harbor the larvae that cause trichinosis.
> For Price, the key piece of evidence is the sole reason given for the taboo in the biblical text—the fact that the pig “has hooves and does not chew its cud.” In other words, it’s unlike ruminants. He argues that this harks back to an era when the Israelites were simple pastoralists. As their descendants settled down in towns and cities, raising pigs became a more viable option. “This detracted from the fantasy of living like their ancestors,” says Price, prompting Judean priests to ban eating pork.
> Rosenblum argues that the pig taboo only gained special status with the invasion of the Levant by the forces of the Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. These European conquerors enjoyed their pork, and pig consumption in the Levant soared. So did tensions between Judeans and their Hellenistic rulers, including the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt and the leaders of the Seleucid Empire based in today’s Iraq.
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teleforce - 8 months ago
If you care to read the comments for the mentioned article (318 comments) including mine, perhaps you'll get the different perspectives on eating pork [1].
Although the article is a good one but the conclusions can be misleading because it's biased toward archeological evidences that most probably did not tell the entire story.
Just like the history of people migration you simply cannot rely on one aspect of archeological evidences alone by ignoring genetic and proto-languages, for examples.
The same with dietary constraints and prohibitions you need to take into account other evidences for example religions together with the other archeological evidences.
Although the article mentioned religions early on but it kind of dismissed them at the end. For me it's rather myopic view and incomplete methodology of doing research since you need to take every relevant aspects into account for your valid conclusions especially the other important factors in dietary constraints in this case the religious prohibitions.
[1] The Origin of the Pork Taboo:
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swampthing - 8 months ago
I don't think that's accurate — the article doesn't dismiss religions at all, it examines theories for why religions have the taboo in the first place.
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teleforce - 8 months ago
I'm not sure about you but for me the article seems to dismiss the religion factors in the conclusion towards the end although he started from the religious perspective but the weightage for the religion is kind of fade towards the end. The pork dietary constraint and prohibition from Abrahamic religious point of view, started since the beginning of humanity. But this very fact seems missing from the article's conclusion. And the fact the pork is the common dominator of the dietary constraint and prohibition across three major world's religion dietary constraint, it's the elephant in the room that's not addressed and highlighted clearly the in the conclusion [1].
Since Abrahamic religion is very strict on the dietary constraint on pork that strangely or anomalously ignored by the Christians, but not by Jews or Muslim. But apparently the Christians also ignored many religious ruling based on their own Bible including the controversial circumcision that the other two Abrahamic religions observed religiously (pardon the pun) [2].
If all the Abrahamic religions including Judaism, Islam and Christianity (world's three major religions) do follow and observe the pork dietary constraint and prohibition, recommended and ordained by their respective holy books, we are looking at more than half (simple majority) of the world populations are not eating pork due to religious prohibitions.
[1] Religious restrictions on the consumption of pork:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_restrictions_on_the_...
[2] Religion and circumcision:
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swampthing - 8 months ago
By "dismiss the religion factors", do you mean that the author attributed the religious taboos to non-religious origins?
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[deleted]
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taosx - 8 months ago
I ate a lot of such boar meat last year in Greece, it instantly became my favorite due to the hardness and taste but based on this I may avoid it for the foreseeable future.
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hoseyor - 8 months ago
You have nothing to be concerned with if it is cooked thoroughly to safe temperatures. So anything that is slow cooked over time would be safe if cooked to 145° for whole and 160° for ground meat.
The subject person may have undercooked it or likely even come in contact with it while dressing a hog, i.e., touching an eye, scratching the nose, or even touching something that later caused cross contamination.
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Loughla - 8 months ago
Every outbreak story that has ever been printed has that as a background fact. When eating meat, make sure it's cooked thoroughly. I love a good, high quality, rare steak when I know the origin of the animal. But literally everything else gets cooked very, very thoroughly.
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roxolotl - 8 months ago
So I preface this by saying there’s 0 evidence that chronic wasting disease can target humans.
The one thing you can’t kill by cooking are prions. I’ve had a good deal of venison from regions where chronic wasting disease is now prevalent and whenever I’m reminded of its existence I get a tiny bit of fear that it’s just lurking waiting. All the prion death stories out there are horrifying and random.
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kubectl_h - 8 months ago
There are researchers out there investigating a potential link from CWD tainted meat consumption to CJD clusters. From what I've read it's a tenuous correlation at best. I really hope they don't find anything. If CWD jumps to either humans or cattle it's going to call for some really tough decisions on what to do with these deer populations.
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xeromal - 8 months ago
It'll have to be like the chicken flu cullings. Gonna be brutal. I think it spread to GA my home state finally even though I believe it originated in Colorado?
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satvikpendem - 8 months ago
> Every outbreak story that has ever been printed has that as a background fact
That's definitely not the case, some people eat raw meat too [0].
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/15/teenage-boy-di...
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sim7c00 - 8 months ago
in a lot of places ppl will never ever touch rare meat. its disgusting to them, unsanitary. my wife loves sushi but refuses to eat rare fish. she says to her its like eating litteral sh/t. conditioning from where she was raised. (she eats the rice n cucumber rolls haha)
we cook salmon so thoroughly it makes fried chicken look raw :'). God bless spices!
Id never recommend eating raw meat. I worked at a distribution butchery for super markets in a country that arguably has one of the cleanest and strictest pipelines for such stuff and i'll tell u. its just people packing ur stuff.. its incredibly easy for a chain of events to happen to get properly sourced meat infected with pretty much anyhting. many opportunities along the route from slaughter to packaging etc.
its not gross or badly managed, just how it is with humans handling things, heat needed during the process, many transports and different handoffs during production process.
so yeah, cook it n cook it good is all i can say. dont trust some sticker on a package to tell u its safer than somethin else
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caseyohara - 8 months ago
“Rare” fish is always a bad idea, but perhaps you meant “raw”, which is different.
Raw fish like used in sushi/sashimi is generally safe because the fish is flash frozen, which is as effective as thorough cooking for killing parasites.
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jnwatson - 8 months ago
Raw fish is flash frozen in the US. Not necessarily so in other countries. Be careful eating sushi outside the US/Japan.
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scheme271 - 8 months ago
Ahi/Tuna doesn't have to be flash frozen in the US. There's an FDA exception for it.
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pfdietz - 8 months ago
Flash freezing may kill multicellular parasites, but I don't believe it will kill bacteria.
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geophile - 8 months ago
I (an American -- don't blame me, I voted for Harris) traveled to New Brunswick a few years ago. Went to a pub in St. Johns and ordered a burger, medium rare. The waitress informed me that they can't do that. By law, for public health reasons, ground meet served by restaurants must be cooked at a temperature that rules out even medium rare.
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briandear - 8 months ago
Did Harris propose something relevant in Canadian meat cooking practices? I’m confused how who you voted for has any relevance to meat practices.
More relevant, does that mean steak tartar is illegal in Canada? A person willing to buy uncooked ground beef is not allowed to buy it from someone willing to serve it?
Interesting article: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/medium-rare-burgers-are...
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rsynnott - 8 months ago
That’s the case in many countries. Rare ground beef is a very different proposition to a rare steak. The reason that a lump of rare beef is safe(ish) is that bacteria are not good at migrating into the muscle tissue; if there’s something undesirable present it will likely be on the surface and is destroyed by cooking. But once you make ground beef, all bets are off; if there was, say, E. coli present on the surface, it’s all over the place now.
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lagniappe - 8 months ago
Please don't use HN for this type of remark, we're just nerds here.
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atkailash - 8 months ago
[dead]
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potato3732842 - 8 months ago
Slow cooking "as practiced" is a VERY safe cooking method for anything sus because people tend to go way hot for internal temp, like 180-205ish (freedom degrees obviously), in order to render the fat.
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bigstrat2003 - 8 months ago
Why would the temperature differ for ground vs whole meat? Surely the same temperature would have the same ability to kill bacteria no matter the way the meat was processed.
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potato3732842 - 8 months ago
Because there's lot of bad stuff that's external to the muscle that can wind up on the surface as a result of the butchering process. When you grind the meat you potentially mix that throughout so you gotta cook it throughout whereas a steak can be eaten raw-ish in the center.
This is how ground beef e-coli outbreaks work. People don't cook their burgers through and get sick.
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nkrisc - 8 months ago
Based on the article it seems the infection likely occurred while he was handling the raw meat. Wear gloves and wash your hands and surfaces well and take precautions to avoid cross-contaminating ingredients that won’t be cooked to safe temperatures. Standard kitchen and food safety stuff.
If you’re not preparing it yourself, then it could be reasonable to avoid it if you’re aren’t confident in the preparation.
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metaphor - 8 months ago
Was thinking the same thing as well. I've hunted in this region a long time ago (on a private hunting club in Ocala) with an old friend from uni who explicitly advised that wearing gloves while handling wild hog was an absolute safety must because of infection risk.
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gcheong - 8 months ago
In the article the person said they had been getting the feral hog meat from a hunter who had gifted him raw meat several times and that he handled it with his bare hands while preparing it and then cooking it an eating it. The doctors surmised it was most likely his handling it with bare hands that was the vector of transmission, not eating the cooked meat.
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jcd000 - 8 months ago
You are safe as long as pig meat is cooked well done, which we always do in Greece. But it pays to be aware and careful.
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atmosx - 8 months ago
The people of Epirus, Crete, and Central Greece, in particular, have perfected the art of cooking meats like lamb and boar.
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taosx - 8 months ago
Thank you for all the assurances and suggestions for the future. The meat was cooked very well but the problem I think it's that me and my friends (hunters) were unaware of such a possibility.
We were the ones that brought back, cleaned and prepared the boar with our bare hands with no precautions (we were in the mountains). The only thing that gives me a bit of piece of mind is that several months passed since then and we have no symptoms and I know many other people that have eaten wild boar from that area that have no symptoms.
throwanem - 8 months ago
I knew this man the instant they said he's in his seventies and still taking boar. Who knew Uncle Bram was still kickin' around after all these years?
rvba - 8 months ago
> an extremely infectious bacteria
> In the US, there are only about 80 to 140 brucellosis cases reported each year, and they're mostly caused by B. melitensis and B. abortus
The article doesnt seem to be consistent...
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ethagknight - 8 months ago
Not to be that guy, but the pork and beef industries are well known for fearmongering around any alternative source of product, be it from Mexico, Latin America, or in this case wild boar that are literally breeding like rabbits and running amok across Texas and other parts of the American south. Unregulated competition is a big problem for the industry.
When I read an article like this, I sort of roll my eyes, cook your meat properly, enough with the scare tactics!
Maybe to put it another way, why is this article being written? Just a nerdy interesting issue with targeted appeal that has arisen? Slow news day? More likely a campaign of some sort for some reason but someone wants to squash.
blackeyeblitzar - 9 months ago
Interestingly, on the front page right now is a discussion titled "The Origin of the Pork Taboo"
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fxtentacle - 8 months ago
And this article says "study from Saudi Arabia, where Brucella is endemic", which I'd say would be a pretty compelling reason not to eat pigs in Saudi Arabia.
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hoseyor - 8 months ago
It’s crazy to think that a religious dictate of Islam and Judaism may have its origins in not cooking meat thoroughly or good practices during dressing and butchering.
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usrusr - 8 months ago
What's crazy about that? Religion used to be long term knowledge encoding (multigenerational). Evolved knowledge, the group that stumbled into a pig taboo just happened to be more successful than the group without. In an area where pigs are better not eaten, either the former would eventually replace the latter or the advantageous knowledge spreads. I'd consider it crazy to think of (the roots of) religion to be anything else.
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aprilthird2021 - 8 months ago
> Evolved knowledge, the group that stumbled into a pig taboo just happened to be more successful than the group without
This doesn't really track though. Because by this logic, polygamous religions would have overtaken monogamous ones. Or religions like Jainism and Buddhism would have not lasted as long as they did. Religions are not solely evolutionary, nor are the customs and traditions of cultures over time. They aren't genetic traits that evolutionary theory applies to them.
Also consider, nothing about Judaism is disadvantageous by your logic but it has become a small minority religion largely as a result of persecution over the ages. There's not an evolutionary aspect there.
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usrusr - 8 months ago
> Because by this logic, polygamous religions would have overtaken monogamous ones
Would they? Are societies where children are hardly more than a number to their fathers necessarily more successful, more stable?
Unlike genetic traits, religions and other cultural traits are software, not hardware. (yes, genetic traits are information, but so is VHDL). Individuals can change their mind, adapt the ways of a different group, not possible with genes.
You point out Judaism, that one's quite an outlier because it's so unaccepting of would be believers who weren't born into it. Turns out forks that do away with that part spread quite far.
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aprilthird2021 - 8 months ago
Of course. Polygamous societies can afford to lose men in wars and riskier adventures that cause the society and culture to expand (by your logic).
Again I don't accept the religions spread solely because of their features that beat out other religions in adaptation. It ignores that people may be convinced about the content of the religion, which people back then would have cared about more, rather than the features of the religion, which we modern people care about nowadays more.
Many religions are unaccepting of people born outside. Hinduism is an example. Even only one section of Hindus was actually allowed to even study the religion at all.
Like I mentioned, and which you ignored, religions like Jainism and Buddhism would have died out. What about Zoroastrianism, Manicheanism, etc. caused them to die out vs something like Jainism.
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aprilthird2021 - 8 months ago
Many religious dictates of the two religions with a standing religious law and polity had a usefulness in the past and a second, slightly different usefulness in the modern era of loneliness, alienation, lack of identity, etc.
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prmoustache - 8 months ago
Not at all.
They had identified a global health issue and a potential source without necessarily knowing all the details. Banning pork seemed reasonnable if they couldn't make sure people don't get sick after eating it.
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h0l0cube - 8 months ago
Those religious dictates were well before germ theory.
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34679 - 8 months ago
That's kind of the point.
Man eats pork. Man gets sick. Man believes God made him sick for eating pork.
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h0l0cube - 8 months ago
Not really the point. The modern "practices during dressing and butchering" highlighted by the GGP were based on the understanding of the germ theory of disease.
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jajko - 8 months ago
I presume you know nothing about islam, but pigs are off the table (and kitchen) without exception. I don't think there is a way to buy it there, same as beef in India for example (even pork I never saw on any menu some 15 years ago when spending 6 months backpacking there, and I saw literally 1 pig altogether in those 6 months).
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Hojojo - 8 months ago
From how I understand it, pigs became taboo because they are a common disease vector. There's nothing fundamentally different between pigs, horses, and cows/bulls which would otherwise motivate banning one over the other. One could apply the same thing to cows in India, where the benefits of keeping cows (milk, dung, labor) outweigh the benefits of slaughtering them for food while also being more sustainable.
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frontfor - 8 months ago
Yes, since there’s nothing more powerful than religious belief, how do you teach a population to avoid doing a particular risky thing? By codifying it as an iron-clad zero-tolerance word-of-god holy decree, so much so that adherents aren’t even cognisant of the mechanism at play.
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sorokod - 8 months ago
> how do you teach a population to avoid doing a particular risky thing?
Why should health risk vectors be framed as religious prohibitions? Shouldn't accumulated observations and common sense, developed since the early Iron Age, be sufficient?
For example, in Judaism, the prohibition of pork consumption [1] is completely unrelated to health risks. Alternatively, are Christians immune to Brucellosis?
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pton_xd - 8 months ago
> For example, in Judaism, the prohibition of pork consumption [1] is completely unrelated to health risks.
What's the reasoning behind not eating pork then? The link you posted calls pigs "unclean" right?
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lupusreal - 8 months ago
What's the reason for all their other rules? People fixate on pork because that's the one rule which seems to have a rational basis, but the Jewish religion (and others) have tons of rules which are much wackier. What's the basis for their rule banning the mixing of wool with linen, but permitting either or by themselves?
Probably it was some ancient schizo that got his harebrained nonsense written down, or it was just a power flex over adherents as cults do, or some mix of the two. Assuming that these religious rules must have an underlying rational basis is foolish. Given the context of the pork rule, being surrounded by hundreds of completely wacky rules, it seems most likely to me that the pork rule was completely arbitrary and turned out to be "correct" by accident.
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- 8 months ago
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amanaplanacanal - 8 months ago
It's currently unknown where the prohibition came from. It seems to have appeared during the finalization of the Torah sometime between the second and fifth centuries BCE. Pigs were widely grown and eaten in that period.
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graemep - 8 months ago
> For example, in Judaism, the prohibition of pork consumption [1] is completely unrelated to health risks. Alternatively, are Christians immune to Brucellosis?
Possibly at much lower risk. It appears that this particular dangerous form of brucellosis is not even distributed across regions and this case seems to related to feral rather than farmed pork.
The Greeks in the eastern Mediterranean at the time did eat pork, presumably without a high disease risk, so I would guess the risk was lower in the populations and places from which non-Jewish early Christians came.
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sorokod - 8 months ago
Not an epidemiologist and will deffer to you on brucellosis distribution.
From religious perspective, the prohibition was lifted by divine decree somewhere in the 1st century (since Peter, first-century Jew living in Judea, is mentioned). Reported in Acts 10:
... Peter went up on the roof to pray.
10 He became hungry and wanted something to eat, but while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance.
11 He saw heaven open and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners.
12 It contained all kinds of four-footed animals and reptiles of the earth, as well as birds of the air.
13 Then a voice said to him: “Get up, Peter, kill and eat!”
14 “No, Lord!” Peter answered. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”
15 The voice spoke to him a second time: “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”
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bentley - 8 months ago
Well, this divine decree isn’t talking about food. It’s actually a metaphor for Christianity opening its doors to Gentile converts instead of just Jews. This is how Peter himself interpreted it:
27 As Peter talked with him, he went inside and found many people gathered together.
28 He said to them, “You know how unlawful it is for a Jew to associate with a foreigner or visit him. But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean.
29 So when I was invited, I came without objection. I ask, then, why have you sent for me?”
…
34 Then Peter began to speak: “I now truly understand that God does not show favoritism,
35 but welcomes those from every nation who fear Him and do what is right.
36 He has sent this message to the people of Israel, proclaiming the gospel of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all.”
A better passage would be Mark 9:17, which explicitly talks about food:
14 Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this.
15 Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.”
17 After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable.
18 “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them?
19 For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.)
20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them.
21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder,
22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.
23 All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”
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sorokod - 8 months ago
> It’s actually a metaphor for Christianity opening its doors to Gentile converts instead of just Jews.
Yep,come and bring your yummy pork and fried calamari metaphor.
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graemep - 8 months ago
That explains why such rules are beneficial, but does not explain how such rules should come about.
They date back thousands of years when no one knew the mechanisms so its not deliberate. It could be evolution of cultures - in that groups that followed certain rules survived better.
The first problem I see with that is that the two main religions that ban pork also have a lot of other rules about food, dress and grooming, sexual behaviour, and lots of other things. SOme of them (hygiene rules, for example) are beneficial, but how do you explain the rest. SOme might have less obvious benefits in the context of the society they originated in - but all?
The other is that you do not need rules to be religious. Social norms are just as powerful. The persistence of circumcision in the US illustrates this. It is still common (usual?) despite the largest religion not only not requiring, but its scriptures specifically state it is not a religious requirement (and dispenses with the entire set of detailed rules - retaining only some more general ones).
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hoseyor - 8 months ago
You’re being rather spiteful and conceited with your hindsight. For all intents and purposes, the risk to people in the past of losing anyone to some disease they didn’t even know existed, which was not only disabling but also drained resources and energy from the whole group, would have simply not allowed “non-iron-clad” rules that could have led to the total destruction of the tribe/group.
Those religious iron-clad decrees could very well be the only reason any of us exist at all, because it allowed people to not just forget, e.g., that time when the tribe ate a big pig feast and 99% of the tribe died.
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ttyprintk - 8 months ago
I would say that these kinds of religious edicts discourage investigation and development. The authority to elaborate on dietary taboos is then an expert on an ancient language, (trying to tell if an animal is “cloven hoof” by a murky description) rather than a scientist. Any God not spiteful nor conceited would want us to learn how to boil water; to learn by using thought.
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codr7 - 8 months ago
Except pigs have a lot more in common with humans than the others.
Pigs are super intelligent, we have the same blood groups, organ compatibility, piglets smell like newborn babies, their skin is very similar to human skin.
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kragen - 8 months ago
Horses and cows have much better-smelling poop than hogs do, and they generally won't eat human poop, rotting garbage, fallen soldiers on battlefields, or small children that happen to trip and fall. Hogs will eat all of these.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_toilet
We don't really know the origin of the taboo, but there are more candidate explanations than just epidemiology.
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jjallen - 8 months ago
This is one of the most digusting things I've ever read about. Thank you.
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MichaelRo - 8 months ago
[flagged]
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m0llusk - 8 months ago
Actually, there are a number of ways in which pigs and humans share physiology which makes us susceptible to shared disease vectors. Perhaps most obvious is our skin. Pigs and humans are the only land mammals who have what amounts to sea mammal skin, leathery and thick with fat deposits right at the dermis.
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- 8 months ago
[deleted]
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black_13 - 8 months ago
[dead]
ajayasimha - 8 months ago
[flagged]
DrNosferatu - 8 months ago
How could he afford all this medical care?
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dharmab - 8 months ago
Presumably, by buying health insurance.
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DrNosferatu - 8 months ago
The lifestyle description seems less affluent than Walter ‘Heisenberg’ White.
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dharmab - 8 months ago
...I think you've misunderstood how health insurance works.
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sejje - 8 months ago
And perhaps television
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cowfarts - 8 months ago
If old - medicare
If veteran [1] - VA
If indigent - medicaid
[1] not unlikely for a Florida man born in 1945
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reaperducer - 8 months ago
How could he afford all this medical care?
Why does it matter? Why introduce a completely off topic question?
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inetknght - 8 months ago
This isn't such an off topic discussion -- dealing with health issues certainly does lead to discussing health insurance.
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alistairSH - 8 months ago
Article stated he’s a pastor. It’s likely the church where he preaches provides insurance.
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hoseyor - 8 months ago
My guess is being retired military.
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