this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 79 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Had to look up why sea turtle meat would kill, since it's not reported in the article. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelonitoxism

[–] [email protected] 95 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Sea turtle meat is considered a delicacy by Zanzibar’s people even though it periodically results in deaths from chelonitoxism, a type of food poisoning.

Second paragraph.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 6 months ago

Typical NBC not embedding an entire wikipedia page in their article. smh my head.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

It's incredible, I've never seen a disease with so little information on the actual mechanism behind it. The articles just lists where it happens and every symptom you can think of. The word Chelonitoxin itself just refers to the scientific name of these turtles Chelonia followed by toxin.

I dug a little deeper and found this:

Salmonella sp., Proteus sp., Aeromonas, Escherichia coli, Citrobacter sp., Enterobacter sp., Klebsiella sp., Morganella morganii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Salmonella sp. and Shigella sp. are some of the pathogenic microorganisms found in this study. Some of these microorganisms are common bacterial flora of nesting green turtles (Santoro et al., 2006).

So it looks like the gut biome of the turtles is capable of killing humans. My first guess was going to be the diet of the turtles.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Huh, fascinating stuff. Wonder what triggers it

[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 months ago (1 children)

cyanobacteria infection of the turtle. it can also happen if they dont parboil the turtle meat correctly. that's the best i could find using an Internet search

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

Wikipedia notes that the likely cause is a neurotoxin. Apparently it's an area of little research, though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

The 'why' is lacking in the wiki article too, unfortunately.