The Brief Case: an Infectious Hazard of Hunting
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A 38-year-old previously healthy man residing in British Columbia (BC), Canada, presented to medical attention with a 5-day history of fever, chills, night sweats, diffuse myalgias, and arthralgias.He presented no recent travel history.Several months earlier, he had successfully harvested a black bear (Ursus americanus) in BC, and the gathered meat was divided into several pieces and conserved frozen for later consumption.Two days prior to symptom onset, he and four household members ingested meat from the bear which had been thawed and cooked as meatballs.Three other household members also fell ill in the same time frame, but with milder symptoms that did not prompt medical assessment.Several meatballs were subsequently found to have not been thoroughly cooked.Two days after ingestion, the patient noted vague abdominal discomfort and nausea.Eight days after ingestion, he reported intense fever and chills.He also developed mild headache, severe prostration, myalgia in proximal limb muscles, transient abdominal pain, and pink-tinged urine that had resolved at the time of presentation.He denied any vomiting, diarrhea, chest pain, shortness of breath, adenopathy, or rash.The fever lasted for 9 days total, manifesting primarily at night.On examination, his vital signs and physical exam findings were within normal limits.Complete blood cell count was notable for a mildly increased white blood cell count (10.4*10 9 /L; normal range 4.0 to 10.0), and hypereosinophilia (3.3*10 9 /L; normal range 0 to 0.50).Aspartate aminotransferase (AST) (61U/L; normal range 15 to 45), creatine kinase (762U/L; normal range 55 to 170), and C-reactive protein (64.6 mg/L; normal ,10) were all elevated.Bilirubin, creatinine, and international normalized ratio (INR) were within normal range.SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR respiratory testing was negative, as was HIV screening, and blood cultures at 5 days of incubation.Trichinella serology by commercial indirect enzyme immunoassay (ELISA) targeting the excretory-secretory (ES) antigen performed at the National Reference Center for Parasitology (Montreal, Canada) on a sample drawn 1 week after ingestion of the bear meat was negative.Given the clinical suspicion for Trichinella infection, empirical treatment with mebendazole (400 mg po TID) was initiated on day 12 of illness, for a total of 13 days.The diagnosis of acute trichinellosis was subsequently confirmed based on repeat serological testing performed at the same reference laboratory with the same methodology as initially performed 6 weeks after having consumed the harvested meat which demonstrated a high positive response (optical density [OD] of 3.57; reference high positive cut-off OD $ 1.20).Further microbiological investigations were performed to confirm the source and
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".