If you want to eat slugs, you must cook them first. A young man in Australia was recently taken to hospital with severe meningitis. At first the cause was a mystery. But 鈥渞epeated questioning revealed that the patient had ingested, five weeks earlier, for a dare, two slugs鈥�, reports John Walker of Sydney University in The Medical Journal of Australia.
Slugs, it turns out, harbour the larval stage of a rat parasite, Angiostrongylus cantonensis. This can crawl out of the gut up to your brain, causing inflammation. The risks of eating raw slugs are well known in Asia but cooking kills the parasite.