Mom feeds live tadpoles to her kid, says they will help keep him healthy
Parents, don’t feed your kids live tadpoles
A video showing a Chinese mother spoon-feeding her young son live tadpoles has raised a ruckus online
While the mom claims that the creatures will help to keep the child healthy and fit, pediatric surgeons disagree with her assessment, explaining that tadpoles after often infected with parasites and, if consumed raw, could likely lead to infection in the child.
It turns out that eating live tadpoles is actually common in some areas of rural China. A medical report funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China that was published last year even warned about the risks of this growing practice.
According to a study conducted by researchers, 11.93% of tadpoles in Henan province are infected with plerocercoids, the larval form of certain tapeworms. When eaten raw, these infected tadpoles can lead to sparganosis in humans, a dangerous type of parasitic infection.
The report cites one example of a 29-year-old farmer who was hospitalized in severe condition for more than a month due to an infection that resulted from his habit of regularly eating live tadpoles, believing that the creatures would help treat his skin disease.
“The comprehensive public health education should be carried out for people in endemic areas and the bad habit of eating live tadpoles must be discouraged,” the report concludes.
However, not everyone thinks that feasting on live tadpoles is such a bad idea. In his memoir from 2016, English TV presenter and naturalist Chris Packham argued that children ought to eat tadpoles because the experience would bring them closer to nature.
Packham is apparently speaking from experience here. He writes that his own love of nature blossomed when he was young as pollywogs squirmed down his esophagus:
The result of my possibly excessive appetite for juvenile amphibians wasn’t diagnosed through any medical examination so I cant prove anything scientifically. But those harmless inoculations probably positively contributed to the ignition of a spark that fuelled a lifelong interest in living things, an enduring curiosity in everything that creeps, climbs, bites, stings, slithers, scuttles or slimes; and in entirely romantic terms, I imagined, the molecules of the tadpoles i digested were fused into the fabric of my eyes to facilitate a heightened awareness if life and instilled a profound love for it, the likes of which could never have arisen from my sterile school studies…. but only from the heart that fluttered as my throat was tickled, softly, by the simple beauty at that essential point in my own metamorphosis.
We wonder how he feels about owl wine.
