Are they sure that’s the direction of causation? Because eating undercooked bear is the sort of behavior I’d expect from people who were already infected with brain worms.
It's the same thing you get eatting undercooked pork. Only recently did the pork industry manage to get it mostly out of their herds so now the "recommended temp" to cook pork is dropping.
But it's still very common in bears so you have to treat it like pork and cooked it to 165*
which sucks, I'd love to try a juicy rare black bear steak.
"Minnesota and the CDC reported that the three hospitalized patients were treated with the anti-parasitic drug albendazole and recovered."
Albendazole and mebendazole kill of intestinal parasites in the same way. They starve them of sugars for several hours. I bring both up just because it rings angry memories about US Healthcare. They typically work with a single dose treatment.
Mebendazole is a prescription pill in the US and despite having been made in around the early 1970's and costing around 4 cents a pill to make, in the US, after getting a prescription, the pills are $250 a piece.
In most of the world, they are prescription free and you can pick up a 6 pack of them for like $12.
The health experts noted how tricky it can be to identify and diagnose these rare cases but flagged periorbital edema and the eosinophilia as being key clinical clues to the grizzly infections
A lot of the meat you eat already has parasites in it. You probably have parasites in you right now. But they're very, very small, and cooking kills them and their eggs just fine. You'd have to put the meat under a microscope to really see them.