Yeah, wild game (pigs/hogs, bears, etc.) get Trichinosis from consuming flesh of other animals (rodents mostly, but also the “tail biting” & cannibalism that pigs do).
More info. here:
https://honest-food.net/on-trichinosis-in-wild-game/
Thanks. Domestic pigs do eat things .ike rats, mice, dead birds etc. A farmer near us used to raise chickens above pigs, and as the chickens died, he’d brush them to openings in the floor for the ligs to feed on. That was back in the 70’s. While rare now, trichinosis I imagine might still be acquired from even domestic pork but it’s mostly eradicated. I still can’t get my mind to accept lower Temps for cooking it though.
Thanks for the links. Reading them now
The second d article talks about what I mentioned about sous vide and the time factor- very interesting g article- while tnings like chi ken cooked to 135 a d held for an hour at that temp would kill the nasties, i still, souldnt trust it- I might try it at 150- maybe- but bear meat? Nope- not for me, 165 for me.
anyways, here’s the snippet:
“You can also kill any trichinae parasite by heat. And the “kill temperature” is a helluva lot cooler than you might think. The origin of the odd USDA mandated internal cooking temperature of 160°F appears to be the government trying to account for inaccuracy and idiocy. (That temperature is more relevant for salmonella than trich.) The actual temperature that kills the trichinella parasite is 137°F, which happens to be medium-rare.
But be forewarned: Every iota of meat must hit that temperature to kill the parasite, and cooking bear meat to medium-rare isn’t a guarantee of that. In fact, Steve Rinella and his crew ate rare bear meat in Alaska recently and most of them got trichinosis. Steve did a video about the experience here.
You can certainly make medium-rare bear meat safe using the sous vide method, but you’d need to hold the meat at 137°F for an hour or so to make sure — and then you’d want to sear it on the outside to kill any possible bacteria that survived that low temp. As for me? I like to sous vide bear at about 145°F for an hour or more, which is still a lovely tender and pink piece of meat, and is safe to eat that way.
Unfortunately, the two trichinella species most associated with bears are immune to freezing. These are T. nativa, the Canadian and Alaskan species, and T-6, the dominant species of parasite from a line stretching from about Washington state across to Maine down to the Rockies, the Great Plains, the Midwest and the Northeast — really where all the good bear hunting is. Only southern states appear to be immune to this species. (Here is a map from a Stanford study.):”