Botulism or what?

Recently three adults in a family (nz) ate wild pork and within a very short period of time became sick with what is suspected but yet to be confirmed botulism.
The three ended up in hospital nearly dying. Anyway long story short they survived but after 35 days in hospital they returned home and discover unsurprisingly that the food in their fridge had all gone bad except the pork.

They are considering independent testing on the meat, which I would get done for sure. They are still waiting for the test results from Queensland. .why does it take so long to test something.

Sorry my thread is badly written but I just wanted to get other people's opinions about this. I hope my link works as I'm crap at the link thing.
PS why are some of my words underlined.

www.nzherald.co.nz...

a reply to: Cloudbuster

The article says they collapsed within minutes of eating the meal. They should check all the other ingredients too.

a reply to: Cloudbuster

Bizarre, I wonder what kind of toxin would be present in wild boar, and who the hell eats wild boar anyways, to me that's straight out of an asterix comic.

a reply to: hopenotfeariswhatweneed

We sometimes eat wild pig off my dad's farm, I'm thinking it's not botulism. Still wondering why it takes do long foe the test results .

a reply to: Trueman

Yes maybe they should but what made the meat stay in perfecr.

a reply to: Cloudbuster

Do you roast it on a spit?

I had no idea,hoq about that , and I agree with you it does not sound like botulism.

a reply to: hopenotfeariswhatweneed

Roast it in the fire fuelled old school style oven. Yum. I m falling asleep now bed time, chat amongst yourselives o ll check back in morning.

blinks - just WTF ??????????????

3 adults collapse after a meal - and no one does any testing on the food they ate ???

with refigeration botulisum is pritty rare id like to know how they prepared the meat

sounds like a home cured ham gone wrong ... but to collaps so soon after eating even the most deadly snake on earth gives you longer and thats injected posion

a reply to: markovian
That is a thought. A hog can eat venomous snakes (and actually prefer rattlesnake here in the US) with no ill effects. However , if you are unlucky enough to fry it up shortly afterwards you may definitely have a medical emergency

originally posted by: hopenotfeariswhatweneed
a reply to: Cloudbuster

Bizarre, I wonder what kind of toxin would be present in wild boar, and who the hell eats wild boar anyways, to me that's straight out of an asterix comic.

How do you not know people eat wild game????? That’s more surprising to me than the fact they fell ill, lol

a reply to: Cloudbuster

Botulism is a bacteria, takes time for symptoms to appear. If they were affected in a 'few minutes' that sounds like chemical toxicity, not biological.

Interesting, all the foods in the fridge spoiled 'except the pork'.

Too many Additives like Preservatives, maybe.

ETA: Or they didn't cook the pork thoroughly...?

a reply to: Cloudbuster

Hmm, I wonder, if it was smoked, perhaps it was done with treated lumber loaded with arsenic? Thus making it both toxic and preserving it at the same time?

(I don't know if this would really have such an effect, just speculation.)

a reply to: Cloudbuster

You ask why it takes so long to do the testing necessary to establish the presence, or lack thereof, of contaminants in the food...

Much like blood testing, genetic testing, and so on, the tests necessary to locate and identify a contaminant are not usually all that time intensive in and of themselves.

However, what you have to understand is that most countries have too few lab technicians, and too many samples coming in at any one moment in time. In nations where one has to pay for higher education, the problem is even worse, because the number of people employed in the field is affected, not only by the limitations placed upon staffing by how many folk in the nation are CAPABLE of passing the qualifications and learning the subject well enough to work in the field, but how many people can afford to study the field in depth in the first place.

So what tends to happen, is that the sample is taken, and in the best case scenario, sent a few floors up from the place it was recovered from the patient, put in cold storage, and only when its turn comes (and there are certain priority classifications involved I would imagine), will the sample actually be run through the gamut of tests that are necessary to establish the presence of contaminants and identify them. Its rarely the actual test that takes the bulk of the time, but more often waiting for the queue of samples which arrived beforehand, to be processed, so that the sample you are interested in can be run.

In the worst case scenario, that sample may have to be sent outside the establishment which recovered the sample, traveling from a hospital, to an external, possibly privately run laboratory, extending the time taken to actually get the sample into a queue by the transit time required to move the sample from A to B. This necessarily adds time to the total required to get the result into the hands of those who require it.

Then you have my favourite part, and by that I mean the part which I do not accept the existence of, the part which needs removing from as many places within chains of communication as is physically possible. Administration.

Results are usually proffered to the patient on paper, or discussed with them by their doctor. But in either case, doctors do not receive a call from the lab techs about each and every sample that crosses their workstation. They compile the results, they will be printed out in some administrative office, get signed off to be sent to the physician or in some cases the patient, and begin to move through the physical mail system. These systems are rarely the fastest thing in the world, and unless the situation is such that a failure to IMMEDIATELY alert either patient or physician of the result, could lead to a pandemic outbreak of disease, the slow and steady mail system is usually relied upon, despite the incredible urgency of ANY medical test, from the perspective of the patient. If the patient is medically aware, and received their results direct (not common as far as I understand) from the laboratory which processed their sample, then thats one step removed from the process. But in many hospitals, even getting a result from the lab, down to the office of the doctor dealing with a patient is not what I would call a fast process, and that leaves alone the necessity of that information to potentially travel out to a clinic which is not part of a hospital, but a surgery out in the sticks.

And even if a given hospital has taken it into their heads to send electronic data instead of snail mail, you have to consider the case load of a given practitioner, especially if they are in the chain between patient and laboratory, because they will be getting reports on everyone they are responsible for the health of, leading to an exhaustive amount of mail coming in on any given day. Administratively, there are so many layers and figures and people in the chain which fires this information from lab to patient, that its little wonder its slower than a penny falling flat first through three feet of molasses.

a reply to: markovian

according to the OP source " a curry "

given the rapid onset of symptoms - my " starting point " would be - chemical poisoning

a reply to: ignorant_ape


or an improperly stored homemade condiment. Plenty of fall ill because they store things like garlic improperly.

a reply to: ignorant_ape

They have done testing on the pork only it's sent to Australia for testing.and it has been over 35 days and still yet to be confirmed or no answers yet. Don't know why we can't test it in our own country.

a reply to: TrueBrit

Thanks for your in depth answer TrueBrit. Nice to see you on the boards , haven't seen you around much.

a reply to: Cloudbuster

Pleased to be of service Cloudbuster.

I have been around the boards, but also dealing with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune at home and at work. You know how it is, I am sure!

Botulism would have killed the pig or sickened it if it was infected. If it does have botulism, it came during the processing of the pig. I have no way of knowing if the pig was sick. Botulism would also give the pork a kind of sickening taste, I once ate bad meat, I know that sour taste that leaves an aftertaste in your mouth. They made it with curry though, that would cover the flavor of the toxin. You can even smell bad pork when you cook it.

Maybe something else gave them a problem. Maybe one of their spices was not taken care of properly and it got something growing in it. I wouldn't think anything could grow in curry, but then again, maybe it was not pure curry, maybe it was cut with something else. I buy my spices from the coop, at least the laws governing organic require purity. Bay leaves are often cut with other leaves but most time it is not toxic unless they use mountain laurel.

I am now curious as to what the poison is. If the pork was sitting in the fridge for thirty five days and was bad to begin with, you would think it would have been all rotten. Someone may have put something on it to preserve it but sulfite or nitrite poisoning symptoms are not the same as what they had. A miticide may have got onto the meat at the place it was processed, there are many types of those cleaners used. I do not know if any could cause problems like that, they usually cause DNA damage to our mitochondria. That would be different symptoms.

Something that would destroy blood cells might fire off a coma by lowering blood volume, some types of bacteria like lysteria can excrete chemicals that make cells into mush so it can eat them.

Don't know what it is. I hope I hear the answers to the test results to see what it is. Bad pork smells bad, you would think that it would really smell bad after thirty five days in the fridge, unless it had high amounts of sulfites to kill the smell.