5 Sickened After Eating Undercooked Bear Meat

Five people became seriously ill this year after eating undercooked meat from two Alaska bears, more than doubling the cases of trichinosis reported nationwide, Alaska health officials said Friday.

“It is prudent to assume that all bears in Alaska are infected,” state epidemiologists said in a news release.

The first case involved a 34-year-old Anchorage man who became sick Aug. 3 after frying and eating meat from a black bear killed in June near Prince William Sound. A state lab analyzed the meat and found that it contained larvae of the trichinella worm.

In the second case, four hunters from Wisconsin became ill after frying meat from a bear they killed Aug. 13 near Bethel, where they had gone to hunt caribou. That bear also contained trichinella larvae.

Trichinosis cases from eating bear and walrus meat in Alaska are probably underreported, said epidemiologist Louisa Castrodale, who headed the investigation for the state Division of Public Health.

The last case reported to the state was in 1994. But the Alaska Department of Fish and Game said it knows from blood tests that up to 90% of bears in some areas of Alaska are infected.

Most people who eat infected meat mistake the symptoms that show up weeks or months later as a bad case of the flu. Symptoms include nausea, diarrhea, fever, swollen eyes, aching joints and muscle pains.

Freezing infected pork will kill the larvae, but the trichinella worm found in Alaska is particularly hardy. It has adapted to the Arctic cold, so freezing the meat won’t kill it, Castrodale said.