That is an anisakid worms, fairly common parasite of marine mammal.
Typically Fish are flash frozen, This kills the parasite making it safe to eat. If a person does eat it it's considered self limiting meaning that the parasite can't really maintain and will die on its own as it is not adapted to live in us.
However during this period It can be extremely painful causing a lot of gastrointestinal pain
Then you cough it up, swallow it, and reinfect yourself.
I will never forget when I was a student in a hospital lab where we got a stool sample with a large worm, looked in the patient chart and they were in for a 'bad cough'.
When i worked at a seafood restaurant as a cook we would get an expensive small $500-$1000 block of fresh tuna. I'd always have to cut around these or cut them out for the sashimi cuts.
Unsure, its not a process we did in the kitchen we would get the block delivered and start carving it to serve.
Its raw animal corpse so people should not be surprised that there are parasites. The tuna we used was top grade but that does change the reality of nature.
Complitly real... I have read that these kind of parasites are very common in far east - like japan as they love fresh sushi even though in Japan is mandatory to enforce a freezing treatment - so there are very high number of ppl there that get these parasites and get cramps and pain, and since it is so wide spread thst doctors there know to recognize these fast.There is also this parasite in fish that even though it cannot live in us but its larva can lodge itself into the stomach wall and the only way to get rid of it is by phisicly taking them out. It is much rarer to see them in europe and USA as the fish getting freezed to kill the parasites but these cases do happens especially in torists that was in far east contries and so etimes it us hard to deagnose as not to many doctors know about it.
It is called Anisakis simplex or a herring worm. Its larva do the boring into the stomach but it cannot continue its living cicle in humans so the larva will eventually die of(though there was cases when this larve managed to bore through the stomach right i to the abdominal cavity.. However you will suffer horrible pain till it does and its dying actually can couse your body to have a horrible allergic reactions every time when you eating fish. So after that you cannot eat fish at all raw or cooked. And this thing is hard to diagnose as it resembels other things and cannot be seen without endoscopy.The interesting thing is that this parasite are very known in Japan and they enforce the raw fish freezing (still there are places then do not do this) and from what I have read freezing fish is not all that mandatory in many contries including USA.
Absolutely, commercial freezing is colder and faster, but parasites can be killed in a home freezer. The big trade off is time. It may take a week in your freezer.
Looks like Diphylobothrium latum. It’s the longest of the parasitic worms that can infect humans and classically transmitted through uncooked/undercooked fish
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u/Not_so_ghetto 13d ago edited 13d ago
That is an anisakid worms, fairly common parasite of marine mammal.
Typically Fish are flash frozen, This kills the parasite making it safe to eat. If a person does eat it it's considered self limiting meaning that the parasite can't really maintain and will die on its own as it is not adapted to live in us.
However during this period It can be extremely painful causing a lot of gastrointestinal pain
https://youtu.be/bLfwNThPXzM
Short describing this for those curious
Also r/Parasitology for other parasite posts