Safety of eating raw meat

Alsikepike said:

The characters are fully capable of cooking the meat over a fire. But it takes time, and the two characters are very hungry. I thought it'd be funny to have the,"survivalist," get impatient and simply cut off a piece of the meat and take a bite out of it. I wanted to emphasize how he's in his element in the wilderness and is comfortable with such unsafe and risky activities. When his partner reminds him of the risks, he simply replies, "I'm a simple man. If I'm hungry, I'm gonna eat. Starvation is gonna kill me faster than a parasite. If you wanna wait, that's fine." I wanted to flesh out his impulsiveness and rigidity in his beliefs. I just wanted to make sure the act of eating raw meat is risky, but not downright idiotic or dangerous.

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That kind of makes him sound like a moron, not rigid, imo. I know it's not what you were asking, but anyone over the age of like four knows you're not going to starve in the time it takes to cook something.

Also, no vegetarians? C'mon, toss one in for fun!

Alsikepike said:

The characters are fully capable of cooking the meat over a fire. But it takes time, and the two characters are very hungry. I thought it'd be funny to have the,"survivalist," get impatient and simply cut off a piece of the meat and take a bite out of it. I wanted to emphasize how he's in his element in the wilderness and is comfortable with such unsafe and risky activities. When his partner reminds him of the risks, he simply replies, "I'm a simple man. If I'm hungry, I'm gonna eat. Starvation is gonna kill me faster than a parasite. If you wanna wait, that's fine." I wanted to flesh out his impulsiveness and rigidity in his beliefs. I just wanted to make sure the act of eating raw meat is risky, but not downright idiotic or dangerous.

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This reminds me a lot of guys I know. I know the type, and this is very believable characterization.

My apologies for straying so far off-topic, this is the last I'll address here re CJD.

GeorgeK said:

The problem is they generally don't get autopsies, so the imaging studies are based on extrapolation.
The most recent stuff I've read is years old now but insisted that there was no way to sterilize equipment to be used in surgery. Now autopsy equipment theoretically won't be used in surgery so there should be no risk of contagion to a live patient.
That depends on whose data you go by. Yes there are many different names depending upon species, however direct trans-species inoculation universally results in disease. The variances is manifestations may still be the same causative agent with variances explained by infectious load, age of subject and varying degrees of species resistance.
Don't discount there have been cover-ups.For years the UK insisted that their Scrapie outbreak was Hoof and Mouth disease. There was a case that I know of of a sudden outbreak of what was officially called, "Early onset, rapidly progressive Alzheimers," in Eastern Ky back in the 90's. A lot of people were dead within 2 years. That whole thing was weird. They used to have a festival of Burgoo (brain stew, usually from wild game. Nowadays they use skeletal meat). It never really made the news because the rest of America didn't care what happens in Eastern Ky. The few articles I saw claimed it was the result of inbreeding. I didn't see any actual articles in medical journals about it, but physicians were talking about it amongst ourselves. There was some grant or gift or some sort, some people said it was the life insurance companies, but others said their beloved ones didn't have life insurance, some said the funeral homes, the story was never the same twice, anyway there was a temporary spate of greatly reduced cost for cremations
yep, not worth it because we really don't know what we don't know

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We know more now than we did in the past about prions. All proteins can be denatured and yes one can sterilize prion contaminated instruments.

Decontamination procedures for CJD from the CDC and the WHO.

Symptoms and patterns of disease vary, brain imaging has come a long way. And many autopsies have been done. If you think about it, autopsies were done during the UK outbreak of BSE because it wasn't known at first what these young people were dying from.

Government coverups are a different subject but it's hard to cover up public health information, the UK government does not own the medical research on prions or vCJD.

All one need do is search through PubMed files to find hundreds of studies that include autopsies of people who died from CJD. You will find some autopsies refused or avoided because every morgue is not equipped to manage every infectious pathogen.

PubMed search for creutzfeldt-jakob autopsies.

For example, this research reveals a lot about how cases of CJD are detected: Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease surveillance in Australia, update to December 2014.

Here's another: Overview and evaluation of 15 years of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease surveillance in Belgium, 1998-2012.

Because of the BSE outbreak in the UK, CJD is actively searched for and reported in most nations that have the capability to do so.

Alsikepike said:

The characters are fully capable of cooking the meat over a fire. But it takes time, and the two characters are very hungry. I thought it'd be funny to have the,"survivalist," get impatient and simply cut off a piece of the meat and take a bite out of it. I wanted to emphasize how he's in his element in the wilderness and is comfortable with such unsafe and risky activities. When his partner reminds him of the risks, he simply replies, "I'm a simple man. If I'm hungry, I'm gonna eat. Starvation is gonna kill me faster than a parasite. If you wanna wait, that's fine." I wanted to flesh out his impulsiveness and rigidity in his beliefs. I just wanted to make sure the act of eating raw meat is risky, but not downright idiotic or dangerous.

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From the point of view of the guy being impulsive, I get it. But I'm not sure about the starvation v parasite quote, because no-one's going to starve to death in the time it takes to cook the food, but parasites will make you starve to death more quickly in a food shortage (because you're feeding the parasite as well as yourself). I think if you want to just go for mega impulsive with rigid beliefs, then wouldn't he just insist that the dangers are exaggerated, and maybe the other character can reason that no, he'd rather cook it through than risk a parasitic infection or food poisoning? The last thing you want to do in a survival situation is get ill. You'd still get across the idea that eating raw meat is a bad idea and you'd have characterisation for both of them, i.e. one being more impulsive and the other being a bit more down-to-earth. If I was the latter person (which I'm pretty sure I would be) I'd stake my claim to a quantity of meat in advance, so the other person doesn't eat the whole lot raw before I get to cook mine.

Characters absolutely don't have to be rational all the time. And they don't need to justify irrational behaviour, because in real life, people behave irrationally without justification.

A lot of parasites are big enough to be seen on visual inspection of the meat, so maybe your impulsive guy can give it the quick once over, say he can't see any parasites (therefore it must be totally okay), then eat it.

This is based on my own reaction to what you wrote and isn't representative of any universal truths about what's going to make other people think your character's stupid rather than impulsive.

BTW I saw some venison steaks in Asda with cooking instructions that included cooking times for both well done and medium and thought of this thread.

Neander articulated the problem better than I did the issue I had with the comment.

If you ever watch Survivor, the water isn't potable unless boiled, which the contestants are all well advised of. Depending on where they are, there are various dangers, including brain parasites. There's occasionally been a contestant -- usually an old, gruff guy -- who drinks the water without waiting until they get fire (if you've never seen the show, they're usually given very little at first and have to make fire themselves or wait a day or so to win flint -- and they're also obviously aware the show is not going to let them literally drop dead of thirst on camera; they do starve them pretty good but they'd find a way to have them 'win' what they need to stay alive.).

The rest of the contestants are all 'don't drink that!! Parasites! We have to boil it!' and the old, gruff guy responds along the line of 'parasites schmarasites.' Like it's handwaved in a 'youngsters are too soft these days, who's afraid of that stuff,' kind of thing. It's not 'I'll die of thirst before parasites,' it's 'pfft,' as nd says above.

More agreement with Neander's characterization here.

cornflake said:

Neander articulated the problem better than I did the issue I had with the comment.

If you ever watch Survivor, the water isn't potable unless boiled, which the contestants are all well advised of. Depending on where they are, there are various dangers, including brain parasites. There's occasionally been a contestant -- usually an old, gruff guy -- who drinks the water without waiting until they get fire (if you've never seen the show, they're usually given very little at first and have to make fire themselves or wait a day or so to win flint -- and they're also obviously aware the show is not going to let them literally drop dead of thirst on camera; they do starve them pretty good but they'd find a way to have them 'win' what they need to stay alive.).

The rest of the contestants are all 'don't drink that!! Parasites! We have to boil it!' and the old, gruff guy responds along the line of 'parasites schmarasites.' Like it's handwaved in a 'youngsters are too soft these days, who's afraid of that stuff,' kind of thing. It's not 'I'll die of thirst before parasites,' it's 'pfft,' as nd says above.

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The best part about this summary of Survivor is you can sub in any number of topics other than boiling water/parasites and it's still accurate.

Alsikepike said:

I'm kind of getting conflicting signals from you, you're saying that there is a good chance of catching a parasite. But you also said that parasites used to be a relatively normal occurrence, does that mean that they weren't a big deal? What's the bottom line here?

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There's a reason why life expectancy and quality of life tends to be so much better these days. The thing with parasites is, in general they're not going to kill the host (at least, not quickly), because then they lose their continuous source of food. But that doesn't mean they're not going to suffer deleterious health affects, feel bad, or be otherwise affected in some negative way.