AMERICAN PORK.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2224, 13 April 1881, Page 3

AMERICAN PORK.

By the last mail comes news that the French, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Austrian and Greek governments have prohibited the importation of American pork. This is no doubt on account of the pork in question being infected, as some say to the extent of 8 per cent, with the terrible triohine spiralis. When such meat is oaten by a man, the parasites escape in the alimentary canal and produce myriads of ova, from which proceed innumerable young trichinse. ‘'Each of them,” says a home paper writing on the subject, “ is furnished with a sharp extremity by means of which it can perforate all the soft tissues of the body, and the whole brood soon start upon their travels, their ultimate object being to arrive at muscle, in which they may become encapsuled, until, by being again swallowed, they repeat the history of their race. The migration of the worms riddle the walls af the alimentary canal, the muscles, and the intervening structures with countless tracks of perforation, and the whole process may be described as the infliction of an enormous wound, made up, so to speak, of millions of wounds which would individually have been unnoticed.” It appears that England continues to take American pork, perhaps relying on her extraordinary freedom from the disease. Certainly, until 1871, no single instance of trichina disease had been observed by English physicians in actual practice. Many instances had been recorded of the parasites being found in u post mortem examination, but no suspicion of trichinosis had been entertained during life. The outbreak in 1871 was confined to three persons, and no cases have, so far as we remember, been heard of since. A Wellington contemporary thinks that it would be interesting to know whether trichina spiralis has ever been observed in New Zealand, and perhaps not amiss to consider whether we ought not to discontinue the importation of American hams and bacon.