Expert: Dana Krempels, Ph.D. - 1/6/2010

Question
QUESTION: Dear Dana:  I found you by "Googling" chicken and parasites.  I read some of your responses - and I cannot seem to find any answers to this on my own.  I am not a youngster and have been cooking for many years.  Yesterday I made a large pot of chicken soup (!) and when I started to cut up the chicken breast to place back in the soup, I started to notice red stretchy veins (I thought) throughout the breast meat.  It was a large roaster bird.  They didn't seem to go anywhere (I would expect a blood vessel to have a beginning and end) but were within the meat and some seemed to have "bored" through some tissue.  Is it possible these are worms?  I know that most of avian parasitic worms are in the trachea - however, are they sometimes in the muscle tissue?  Thank you for your time.  LN

ANSWER: Dear Lynn,

It's possible these were nematodes, as they do sometimes invade connective tissues.  There are many different species of nematodes, and a few do infect muscle and connective tissue of vertebrates.  We had a disgusting example of this in my own bunny, Scarlet!  The thing migrated under her skin, and finally disappeared after we treated her with Panacur, but the vet was amazed.  He'd never seen anything like it.

There are nematodes in the family Dracunculidae that make their living inside connective tissue and muscle, but these are found primarily in Africa.  I do know that there are some types of tissue-living nematodes in the U.S., though, from old specimens in our parasitology lab. Just don't know what species they are.

The good news:  if they were well cooked, you cannot be infected from eating them.  Just a bit of extra protein.  (blech!)  This is one reason it's *always* a good idea to NOT eat rare meat:  many types of parasites are so small you can't see them, and a few of those can infect you if they are eaten alive in poorly cooked meat.

Hope this helps.

Dana

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Did you happen to see the image I downloaded?  Blech! is putting it mildly.  Thank you for your attention to my dilemma.

Answer
Dear Lynn,

There was no image attached to the question you sent.  Sometimes the AllExperts server messes up that way.  Be sure the image is saved as a .jpg, and that seems to work.  I'd be very interested to see, if you have time to try again.

Dana