I’ve had many very pleasant encounters with escargot over the years and assume that if the food served by the culinary establishment I’m eating at was a disease carrier the health inspectors would not permit it to be sold, or, at the very least the restaurant owner would think twice about killing off one of his loyal customers. Yes, I know that I live in the good old USA and not China but, given that the snail in the article was cooked as part of the broth the only difference between the two would seem to be that the escargot is a land snail and the Chinese dish might be using a water snail. The problem of absorption of toxic pollutants from the local waters would seem to be a much bigger concern, one solution being raising them under controlled conditions to eliminate the negative environmental variables.