Disease
Swamp eels are an important host for Gnathostoma spinigerum. Eating raw or undercooked swamp eel can cause gnathostomiasis, an important disease in Thailand, Laos, Burma and Vietnam. Neurognathostomiasis has been reported in the US, but a link to imported swamp eels has not been proven.
Gnathostoma binucleatum (which is native to the Americas) has not been previous been reported to cause neurognathostomiasis, suggesting that G. spinigerum has been introduced to the Americas, but a survey of Gnathostoma isolates has not confirmed this.
Read more about this topic: Monopterus Albus
Famous quotes containing the word disease:
“The peace loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to those violations of treaties and those ignorings of humane instincts which today are creating a state of international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality.... When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Smoking ... is downright dangerous. Most people who smoke will eventually contract a fatal disease and die. But they don’t brag about it, do they? Most people who ski, play professional football or drive race cars, will not die—at least not in the act—and yet they are the ones with the glamorous images, the expensive equipment and the mythic proportions. Why this should be I cannot say, unless it is simply that the average American does not know a daredevil when he sees one.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1950)
“There is a disease to which plays as well as men become liable with advancing years. In men it is called doting, in plays dating. The more topical the play the more it dates.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)