Monday, November 11, 2013

Case of the Week 281

The following is an unstained muscle biopsy pressed between 2 glass slides.  The patient experienced myalgia and facial edema 1 week after eating bear meat.





















Diagnosis?

NOTE:  GOOGLE + comments now disabled!  (sorry about the trouble that caused for non-Google + users)

6 comments:

Yenni said...

Beautiful pic of Trichinella spiralis. I wonder this muscle biopsy was taken from which part of the patient's body?

Anonymous said...

Well, Google did play a not very nice trick. Anyway, my response does not change: Trichinella spiralis.

Florida Fan

Anonymous said...

I agree with previous 2 comments regarding genus - but not necessarily species. Could be T. murrelli or T. nativa (for example). Depends a bit on the bear - if polar bear, for example, more likely to be T. nativa.

Anonymous said...

How often do you see "classic" trichinosis from underdone pork? I'm not overly concerned about bear meat.

--bks

Anonymous said...

Wonderful, we need some more enlightenment on the different species of Trichinella and their natural hosts. The great thing about The United States is that the high level of hygiene, health, and sanitation makes a parasite finding very hard to come by.

Florida Fan

Anonymous said...

For those of you who read Swedish, or for those of you who don't but have access to Google Translate, the following link (boar not bear, in this instance) may be of interest: http://svenskjakt.se/Start/Nyheter/2013/10/manniska-smittad-av-trikiner/
The first human case in Sweden in 35 years.
I don't know if the species was identified, but in wildlife in Sweden the following species have been identified:
Trichinella spiralis, T. nativa, T. britovi and T. pseudospiralis.
At least your bear case seems not to be the latter.
I guess I threw the spanner in the works, by suggesting other species than T. spiralis in previous posting.