fne8w2ah9 dead, 78 others hospitalized after eating sea turtle meat on Zanzibar’s Pemba Island
This is tragic.
While the Wikipedia page lists the food poisoning as rare, it still feels like a Russian Roulette kind of meal.
Would you eat something knowing that there is a nonzero chance it might kill you (as in really off you, not just give you a bad night at the bathroom)?
I suppose the answer is a lot of people would, since the article itself mentioned another recent poisoning.
It reminds me of the blowfish which is also lethally poisonous if not handled by someone who’s certified to do so.
I suppose everything in life has a risk and I’ve done my share of reckless things, but rolling the dice on food never appealed to me.
I think we’re just kind of bad at evaluating risks of a relatively low order. In the US. E coli kills some 3000 people a year, and most of have exposure to that risk. I think it might just be that people don’t see much of a difference between chances in the range of, say, 0.1% and 0.00001% of serious illness.