Chinese diners get meningitis from eating snails

At least 50 people have become sick with a form of meningitis after eating raw or half-cooked Amazonian snails in Beijing restaurants. Five of these people are in serious conditions. It is thought that the actual number of the diseased could be higher but the problem is that the symptoms usually don’t show up for a month after eating the snails and the link between meningitis and snails may not be established.

Most of the people became ill after eating a dish called fushouluo at restaurants that specialize in Sichuan-style cooking. These black snails are very popular among the Chinese but they are also hosts to between 3,000 to 6,000 parasites, which could cause headaches, facial paralysis, meningitis and fever by harming the human nervous system.
After the first man got sick, snails from the restaurant where he ate were tested and found to be infected with a meningitis-causing parasite called Angiostrongylus cantonensis.

The Amazonian snails arrived from South America in China back in the 1980s where they have started breeding very fast infiltrating lakes, brooks and ponds across the country. They have also been blamed for destroying large areas of farmland in the south of China where more than 160,000 hectares of crops have been destroyed.

In the last couple of years, Chinese have had some major problems with controlling food-related health incidents. The Beijing Office of Food Safety warned people to be careful about eating raw fish, shrimp, snail, crab, frogs and snakes and called for tighter supervision over aquatic products.