Is it safe to eat Acehnese fish?

Is it safe to eat Acehnese fish?

By Dewi Anggraeni

MELBOURNE (JP): Most people are devastated when a terrible, life-extinguishing accident affects their family. Then, once the loved ones are buried, life goes on, despite memories, grief, regrets and anger, possibly lingering on. Rarely do we have to confront the remains of our loved ones after the event.

The trauma experienced by residents of Aceh after fishermen discovered human remains in the sharks they had caught is therefore understandable. The people had not recovered fully from the Gurita ferry disaster. Now they are faced with the possibility of unwittingly consuming a fish that had not only eaten human flesh, but the flesh of their relatives. It is not surprising that many have been put off eating fish altogether.

In Australia when fishermen catch sharks or other big fish with parts of human bodies in their stomach they contact the police. And the police check the missing persons' files.

"Then the offending fish is usually destroyed, so it is not eaten by humans," says Ray Page, of the Victorian Recreational Fishing Peak Body.

That is well and good. Nobody in his or her right mind would eat a fish that had fed on a human, or in whose stomach parts of human bodies had been found. However, such a find in Aceh has heightened fears of the possibility of unknowingly eating a fish that has digested human flesh.

If the thought makes your stomach squirm, you are not alone. But it actually harmful to the body?

Dr Tony Stewart, Public Health Physician of the MacFarlane- Burnett Center for Medical Research, explained that eating the flesh of such a fish is not harmful.

And if the fish had eaten the flesh of an infected person? The parasites that had infected the human, would have been destroyed, digested and processed, according to Dr Stewart. Humans who ate such fish would not become infected.

"You don't usually eat the stomach of the fish. You eat the flesh. Therefore the risk of infection is virtually zero," says Dr Stewart.

Dr Stewart says that transmission of most diseases requires close physical contact or direct contact with the body fluids of the infected person. This is especially the case with blood diseases like Hepatitis B and HIV. Risk is high in surgery situations where the surgeon comes in direct contact with the patient's body fluids.

In cases where a fish has eaten the flesh of a person infected with either Hepatitis B or HIV, it would not become infected, because the human virus would be destroyed by the fish's digestive system. And the human who ate the flesh of the fish would be even further distanced from the virus.

Physical health is one thing. Emotional well-being is another. The trauma of those who have directly suffered the loss of their loved ones may have very little to do with eating fish after the ferry disaster. However, no doubt there are many who would find some comfort in the knowledge that the flesh of the fist they have consumed, whatever the fish had consumed beforehand, would not have a detrimental effect on their health.

The writer is a free-lance journalist based in Melbourne.