Raw meat & toxoplasma virus

Question
I've been trying intermittent fasting along with a near raw paleo diet for the past week. In searching for info on combining the two, I went to the following website
(http://www.warriordiet.com/blog/). This fellow Ori Hofmekler, made the following claim about the danger of eating raw meat:

...[E]ating raw meat may seem "Paleolithic and healthy" but nowadays it can be detrimental. Besides hosting pathological bacterium, meat is a host substrate for harmful viruses, most notable of which is the toxoplasma virus that has shown to cause serious neuro damaging effects on animals and potentially on humans. Eating raw meat today does not make sense, to say the least.

I only eat raw organic grassfed meat, but I was wondering if you've heard of this toxoplasma virus and what you think of his claims and his Warrior Diet book.

Thank you.

Answer
This is just a needless scare. First, of all, people on a raw-animal-food diet are constantly exposed to bacteria etc., to a much greater extent than those on cooked-food diets) so that their immune-systems get used to  bacteria and viruses, with ease. In fact, one of the biggest problems, nowadays, is that we(well most SAD-eaters, anyway) live in a too hygienically clean environment, devoid of bacteria and parasites, so that our immune-systems are constantly compromised, without access to bacteria in raw food and the environment. Just search online under "Hygiene Hypothesis online to see what I mean. Here are one or two links, for now:-

http://tinyurl.com/2nqqkk

http://tinyurl.com/2oepmu

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/31/2/488

(The 3rd link reminds me of an account by the author James Herriott, in his semi-autobiographical writings as a vet in the countryside, where he also mentioned that the children of the local abattoir-man who slaughtered the farmers'animals turned out to be the healthiest children in the area, "despite" the fact that they routinely played with the raw guts of carcasses left around the abattoir).

Re Toxoplasmosis:- The Toxoplasma protozoan  is not generally referred to as a "virus", but anyway... Toxoplasma is one of the most successful organisms in the world, according to various reports and scientific studies, affecting huge numbers of cats and other wildlife without side-effects, particularly cats,  without harming them(well, except in the case of  rodents, which lose their fear of cats as a result of infection!) In fact, it's been mentioned as being present(in an inactive state) in a third of the human population worldwide(or over a half of humanity, depending on the article one reads), which is a pretty good indication that cooking is largely useless against it, as a method of precaution.

That said, toxoplasmosis has been reported to be a possible problem for those with severely-compromised immune-systems such as those with AIDS etc. Again, though, this is more a question of environment than the relevant organism being a pathogen. For example, Aajonus once cited a study which showed that the average American household contained the Salmonella virus - yet, there was no Salmonella epidemic, despite this:-

"The idea of eradicating microbes like salmonella is ludicrous because they are ubiquitous. At the University of Utah, John R. Roth, Professor of biology, has studied salmonella for 40 years. "[Salmonella] is mostly reported as a pathogen but . . . [lives beneficially] as part of the gut flora." He believes that the idea of banishing it is absurd. "Salmonella is distributed pretty widely," he says. "Sometimes it makes a mistake and gets across the gut wall . . . is an irritation at the gut wall . . . Symptoms can range from a loose stool to more flulike symptoms."

taken from:-

http://tinyurl.com/ywlyjc

One of the things pointed out by scientists is that it's in the best interests of invading organisms not to kill their host as that endangers their own existence. Instead, most such organisms come to an arrangement with their host and act much like symbionts. This is what Aajonus goes on about when he states that the environment is more important than the relevant bacteria/virus.

Re Warrior-Diet:- One of the most lucrative ways for a dietary guru to make money is to sell lots of processed supplements(which are, at best, useless, of course, and often harmful). Ori Hofmekler is one such guru, as he commonly recommends plenty of supplements and other products. This made me doubt his dietary ideas very much, when I first came across them - after all, if one is pushing a certain diet, and then also recommends extra processed supplements, then the very fact that supplements are recommended means that the original recommended diet is likely deficient in many nutrients(otherwise why would supplements be recommended?

At any rate, the very fact that such outbreaks are never reported in the RPD community should indicate that there's nothing to worry about re toxoplasmosis.

RPG

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