This is the best summary I could come up with:
ZANZIBAR, Tanzania — Eight children and an adult died and 78 other people were hospitalized after eating sea turtle meat on Pemba Island in the Zanzibar archipelago, authorities said Saturday.
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.
The adult who died late Friday was the mother of one of the children who succumbed earlier, said the Mkoani District medical officer, Dr. Haji Bakari.
Bakari told The Associated Press that laboratory tests had confirmed all the victims had eaten sea turtle meat.
Authorities in Zanzibar, which is a semi-autonomous region of the East African nation of Tanzania, sent a disaster management team led by Hamza Hassan Juma, who urged people to avoid consuming sea turtles.
In November 2021, seven people, including a 3-year-old, died on Pemba after eating turtle meat, while three others were hospitalized.
The original article contains 159 words, the summary contains 151 words. Saved 5%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Cowabunga! That’s one sick turtle 😎
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
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
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.
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.
Kill from the Grave
I wonder if this is a case of the illness being lethal or the hospitals being bad.
If only there was an article you could read about this incident that would answer your question…
