An Israeli airstrike that caused a huge blaze at a tented area for displaced people in Rafah has killed 45 people, medics have said, with images of charred and dismembered children prompting an outcry from global leaders and putting ceasefire talks in jeopardy.

Bombing overnight that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said targeted senior Hamas militants in a precision strike appears to have ignited fires that spread quickly through tents and makeshift accommodation, overwhelming a nearby field hospital operated by the International Committee of the Red Cross and overstretched local hospitals.

“We pulled out people who were in an unbearable state,” Mohammed Abuassa, who rushed to the scene in the north-western neighbourhood of Tel al-Sultan, told the Associated Press. “We pulled out children who were in pieces. We pulled out young and elderly people. The fire in the camp was unreal.”

The health ministry in the Hamas-controlled area said about half of the dead were women, children and older adults. Barefoot children wandered around the smoking wreckage on Monday as searches for the dead continued and mourning families prepared to bury their loved ones.

Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in parliament that “something unfortunately went tragically wrong” with the airstrike. “We are investigating the incident and will reach conclusions, because this is our policy,” he said.

The US, Israel’s staunchest ally and weapons supplier, described the images from the aftermath as devastating.

The strike, one of the deadliest single incidents in the eight-month war to date, came two days after the international court of justice in The Hague, which arbitrates between states, ordered Israel to stop its operation in Rafah immediately.

More than 85% of the Palestinian territory’s population had sought shelter in the area having fled fighting elsewhere, and a million people have been forced to move again since Israel’s ground operation began on 6 May. Israeli ground troops have so far probed Rafah’s southern and eastern outskirts, rather than its overcrowded centre.

Aid deliveries have slowed to a trickle, with the Rafah and nearby Kerem Shalom crossings effectively blocked.

International censure of Israel’s war against Hamas has grown steadily in tandem with the death toll and humanitarian crisis in the strip, but Israeli officials have repeatedly said that a ground operation in Rafah, where it believes Hamas’s leadership and four battalions of fighters are camped out with Israeli hostages, is necessary for “total victory”.

Friday’s order from the ICJ is binding, but not enforceable. Several countries called on Israel to obey the judges’s 13-2 majority decision in the wake of the Rafah strike.

Qatar, a key mediator between Israel and Hamas in attempts to secure a ceasefire and the release of hostages, said the Rafah casualties would complicate the protracted negotiations. The Israeli daily Haaretz reported later on Monday that Hamas had decided to pull out of the latest proposed talks over what its senior leadership described as a massacre.

Neighbouring Egypt and Jordan, which made peace with Israel decades ago, also condemned the Rafah strike.

Relations between Egypt and Israel, cool at the best of times, have reached a nadir since the Rafah operation began. The situation deteriorated further on Monday after the Israeli military confirmed there had been an exchange of fire between Israeli and Egyptian soldiers in the Rafah crossing area in which at least one member of Egypt’s security forces was killed. Both countries’ militaries are reviewing the incident.

France, a European ally of Israel, said it was outraged by the Rafah strike. “These operations must stop,” the country’s president, Emmanuel Macron, posted on X. “There are no safe areas in Rafah for Palestinian civilians. I call for full respect for international law and an immediate ceasefire.”

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, posted: “Horrified by news coming out of Rafah on Israeli strikes killing dozens of displaced persons, including small children. I condemn this in the strongest terms.”

Italy’s defence minister, Guido Crosetto, said that bombings such as Sunday night’s would have long-standing repercussions for Israel. Speaking to Sky TG24, he said: “Israel with this choice is spreading hatred, rooting hatred that will involve their children and grandchildren. I would have preferred another decision.”

The head of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, said: “The state of Israel continues to violate international law with impunity and in contempt of an international court of justice ruling … ordering an end to its military action in Rafah.”

After criticism of the Rafah strike, the IDF said it had not anticipated civilian casualties, and had bombed an area outside the latest “evacuation zone” to where Palestinians have been ordered to move, although that claim appeared to contradict a previous “safe zone” map from 22 May.

The bombing had killed Hamas’s chief of staff for the West Bank and another senior official responsible for deadly attacks on Israelis, the IDF said.

About 1,200 Israelis were killed and another 250 taken hostage in Hamas’s 7 October attack that triggered the latest conflict. According to the local health ministry, more than 36,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s retaliatory operation, which has left desperate civilians without healthcare, food or water and reduced most of the coastal territory to ruins.

After a week in which Israel’s global standing had plummetted, Sunday’s attack attracted more attention than usual in the Hebrew-language media, which has often avoided daily reporting on the scenes of death and destruction in Gaza.

Several rightwing Israeli journalists celebrated the Rafah attack in appearances on Israeli television and on Twitter, likening it to this week’s Jewish bonfire festival, Lag B’Omer. Commentator Yinon Dromi retweeted another user’s post which showed a fire in Rafah, adding her own: “Happy Holidays.”

Hostilities also flared on Israel’s northern border on Monday. The powerful Lebanese group Hezbollah said it had launched a salvo of rockets at Israeli territory in response to a deadly Israeli strike outside a hospital in southern Lebanon earlier in the day.

Israel has been locked in a battle of attrition with the Iranian-backed militia since 8 October, when Hezbollah began firing missiles at the Jewish state to aid Hamas.

Jillian Ambrose’s interesting articles on heat pump myths (Do heat pumps work at freezing temperatures? 22 May) have not yet mentioned the noise that a single heat pump can generate, and the implication once large swathes of communities start using them.

We stayed at a new-build property in Suffolk last summer, where all eight or so properties had heat pumps. We had to shut the windows in hot conditions as heat pumps went on and off all night, each with its own start-up and switch-off frequency and whine. If you sat in the garden in the evening, it was an annoying, continual source of noise.

I have read that some local authorities now demand noise assessments before agreeing to an installation. The noise of a pump can be up to 65 decibels – like having someone hold a conversation in your garden. Not so bad at 11am, but irritating at 2am. Imagine thousands of them in your town – all stopping and starting all the time. You need to factor in the cost of noise reduction using some form of acoustic barrier in your price calculations and lists of pros and cons.
Martyn Taylor
Reading, Berkshire

In January, I explored the possibility of installing a heat pump via British Gas. I live in a 1930s semi with solid walls. My home is on an estate of hundreds of such houses. To even make my home heat-pump-ready, I would need to install internal or external wall insulation and underfloor insulation, and increase the level of insulation in my loft. I would also have to find room for a water cylinder and have all the piping and radiators replaced. The cost would be about £30,000, only some of which will be eligible for grants.

I already have a gas boiler that could apparently run on hydrogen without all these major changes and disruption to my home.

The installation of heat pumps will often require the wasteful removal of functioning gas boilers, piping and radiators. Surely a sensible and less wasteful way forward is to ensure all new homes are built to high insulation standards with heat pumps, while older properties are offered a transition to hydrogen central heating systems?

As always, there appears to be no clear evidence of a central government strategy.
John Lovelock
Bristol

A lightning strike killed a Colorado rancher and 34 head of cattle over the weekend, officials said.

Mike Morgan, 51, was feeding his cattle from a trailer when he was struck and died on the scene despite life-saving efforts, the Jackson county sheriff’s office said.

The lightning bolt struck on wide open pasture outside the town of Rand, about 80 miles (129 kilometers) north-west of Denver, said George Crocket, the county coroner.

The strike also bowled over around 100 head of cattle that had bunched around the trailer loaded with hay, said Crocket. “All but the 34 got up,” he said.

Morgan’s father-in-law and wife were nearby but survived the blast, said Crocket.

The incident stunned the small, tight knit community where most everybody knows everybody, Crockett said.

Aliyah Boston was looking forward to her second professional season.

The 2023 WNBA Rookie of the Year was coming off a successful debut as a television analyst for ESPN at the NCAA Women’s Final Four in April, one made even sweeter by seeing her beloved alma mater, South Carolina, win the national championship after an undefeated season. The delightful approbation given to Boston from her college and national team head coach Dawn Staley showed how beloved both are within basketball. And after witnessing the Gamecocks cut down the nets by getting revenge on Caitlin Clark’s Iowa – the team who had ended her collegiate career a year before – Boston knew she’d soon be playing alongside Clark, with her WNBA team, the Indiana Fever, set to take the 22-year-old with the No 1 overall pick in the upcoming draft.

Fast forward to now. Clark and Boston are indeed teammates but the Fever started their season with five straight losses, before Friday’s narrow win over the Los Angeles Sparks raised the team’s spirits a little. But an even more important, unfortunate storyline has emerged around the team. ESPN’s Holly Rowe revealed, before the Fever’s second regular season game against the Connecticut Sun, that Boston said she has deleted X from her phone and that TikTok is the only social media platform she now feels safe on. And the reason is the disturbing, toxic backlash she and other WNBA players have received from Clark’s wild fans.

Before we start, it’s important to note that this is not Clark’s fault – and she has not done anything to encourage the abuse of her fellow players. There is much to celebrate about Clark’s nascent superstardom and arrival in the world’s best women’s basketball league. Her historic impact on the college game, which led to the highest TV ratings the NCAA women’s Tournament has ever had, appears to be carrying over to the WNBA. Attendance and TV audience numbers for Clark’s preseason and regular-season debuts with the Fever reached zeniths for the 28-year-old league. Although its players had long fought for charter flights in their collective bargaining agreement talks, Clark being at the center of the W’s newfound popularity has undeniably help usher in that long-awaited change. Hell, Clark’s shoe deal with Nike may have led to the best player in league, A’Ja Wilson, finally getting her own signature shoe.

So, Clark has been a good thing for the league and women’s basketball as a whole. Some of her hardcore fans? Not so much.

Some of the tension originated from the matchup between Clark and Angel Reese in the 2023 NCAA title game. Reese’s boisterous personality was attacked by Clark fans at the same time as they praised their own heroine’s cockiness as “competitiveness”.

And a subset of Clark’s fervent fans have become fully unbearable.

Anywhere one turns on social media, Clark fans are blaming the Fever’s early-season struggles – which had been expected – on everyone but her. Disparaging comments about Boston’s weight and game, the rest of Clark’s Fever teammates and calls for head coach Christie Sides to get fired are constant. Yet those same Clark fans don’t demand accountability from the point guard when it comes to her setting a WNBA debut-record 10 turnovers, her below average defensive play and her zest for perimeter shooting, something she had free rein to do at Iowa but needs to scale back until she improves her consistency at the WNBA level. Clark’s occasional volatile temper, which earned her a rare technical foul last Monday night, is glossed over by her rabid supporters who treat her as an infallible celebrity instead of a still-developing professional player.

Added to this, many Clark fans have never been WNBA fans, and show a significant level of ignorance by not respecting the league’s quarter-century history of producing great athletes. The arrogance of pretending that Clark is the sole reason for any interest in the WNBA, or the high level of play it has long possessed, or believing that her fellow professionals are envious of her, are traits her ardent supporters must rid themselves of. That will not be an easy task though, thanks to NBA legends LeBron James and Charles Barkley only enabling the fans’ childish antics.

On the latest episode of his Mind The Game podcast with JJ Redick, James said that Clark “is the reason why a lot of great things are going to happen in the WNBA”. The Lakers forward even Clark’s early-season struggles to his son Bronny’s NBA draft process, claiming that both are getting “a lot of hatred and animosity”.

Barkley’s take was even more dreadful, as the Inside the NBA luminary claimed that her WNBA counterparts were being “petty” to Clark.

“LeBron, you are 100% right on, these girls hating on Caitlin Clark,” Barkley rambled. “I expect men to be petty because we’re the most insecure group in the world. Y’all should be thanking that girl for giving y’all ass private charters, all the money and visibility she is bringing to the WNBA. Don’t be petty like dudes. What she has accomplished, give her, her followers.”

James and Barkley failed to cite specifically who has been giving hate to Clark, exemplifying how counterproductive their surface-level takes are to an honest conversation around Clark, whose stumbles are entirely understandable for a player in their rookie season. And though James gave a shout out to Boston, he did not mention how awful some of Clark’s rambunctious loyalists have been to the forward. His apparent ignorance of that makes his comments all the more dreary.

Barkley meanwhile shows why Clark’s toxic fans and casual WNBA followers need to educate themselves about the league. The coddling of the talented Clark has been insulting and offensive to the great women of the W who have, despite all the misogynist, racist and homophobic attacks they’ve faced, carried the league to sustainability before her arrival. They aren’t going to just make it an open lay-up line and three-point shooting contest for Clark, something no one would expect any other league, male or female, to do. And the first person to admit that would be Clark herself.

Hopefully Clark’s more toxic fans can change before things get really ugly, something that would be unfortunate in what is supposed to be a golden period in women’s basketball. A period in which Clark, Boston and all who love the WNBA should be able to celebrate instead of squirm.

Since its inception, the international criminal court (ICC) has charged 50 people, 47 of whom were African. Its investigations have also been overwhelmingly focused on war crimes and crimes against humanity in African nations. What has long been understood but never stated is that the court and its processes, to put it bluntly, target a certain type of political leadership that is easier to go after. “The court is built for Africans and thugs like Putin,” is what one appalled elected senior leader reportedly told the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, when his team made a recent application for arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, its defence minister, Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders.

Again, blunt, but not revelatory. At least not to the parts of the world that are more familiar with the court and its investigations. The lineup of suspects and defendants has long solidified the impression below the equator that the ICC is a court for Africans, and lately maybe Russians. How can that not be the takeaway when, in the years since the court was founded, the US – often with British support – has calamitously invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, established an extrajudicial prison for terror suspects, and created a CIA torture and detention network? African conflicts are seen as intimate, tribal and intentional in a way that those in other places are not. The underlying suggestion is that civilians in western wars are killed and illegally detained by accident, while other countries do this on purpose.

It would take a particularly gullible person to believe that it is only the actions of African or Russian leaders that meet the threshold for breaking the rules of engagement in conflict. But there was always a veneer of plausibility. That is now being stripped away by the US and Britain’s indignant rejection of the court’s move against Netanyahu, and the instruction from the international court of justice (ICJ) that Israel ought to protect Palestinians from genocide and halt its offensive in Rafah. Israel has sent its troops to invade another territory, causing the deaths of civilians in the process, yet we are encouraged to think of its campaign as falling along the same lines as all those other “good wars” the west has waged – another of those defensive moral missions during which unfortunate things have happened. Things that somehow never amount to the criminal, because the awfulness of war apparently can’t be avoided.

And besides, Israel is a democracy. The countries that don’t belong in the dock are the ones that investigate themselves, and are seen as not requiring the paternal oversight of global courts. The US Senate delivered a report and indictment of the CIA’s detention and interrogation techniques, while the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war condemned Britain’s military campaign and found that the legal basis was dealt with in an unsatisfactory way. That’s as far as the investigations went. The result was apologies (and unrepentant defiance from Tony Blair), and the performance of oversight was enough to maintain a veneer of justice.

Israel’s record obliterates all these exceptions. Its actions have failed to meet the standards set by its own allies for immunity from judgment. Civilian casualties in Gaza are too large to be written off as necessary collateral. Seven months in, and the goal of defeating Hamas is neither closer nor outlined in a coherent way. The famine and forced displacement of civilians are too systemic to be regarded only as unfortunate byproducts of the campaign. Israel’s reputation as a reliable democracy is shot. Its capacity to credibly investigate itself is too compromised by the short history of its pugnacious rightwing government that will brook no criticism, and its longer history of ignoring international law by allowing the expansion of settlements in occupied territories.

In continuing to treat Israel as a country that is responsible but whose actions are sometimes humanly flawed, its allies are making a perilous calculation that in the long run will undermine their own interests. Their support for Israel’s actions weakens not only international law, but the ability to hold their enemies to account and maintain red lines against belligerent countries in a world where the tools of the international system are becoming ever more important. Rising political and economic forces in Asia, the Middle East and South America are challenging Anglo-American models of power, and making their agenda harder to deliver.

Take the United Arab Emirates, a political player that was nowhere on the map 30 years ago. Today, it is an economic powerhouse and ally of the US, but it has also exchanged high-level meetings with Moscow since the invasion of Ukraine, and it continues to enable Russia to circumvent sanctions. There’s little the US can do about this. According to the Soufan Center, a global security and foreign policy research organisation, there is “little appetite in Washington” to do more than dish out warnings to the UAE.

The same goes for Qatar, which the US can only “urge” to expel Hamas’s political leadership from Doha. I’m old enough to remember a time when that language would have sounded unimaginably feeble. Rising volumes of trade between economies in the global south also increasingly cushion countries against the effect of punitive western sanctions. Chinese companies recently sanctioned for helping Russia belong to an economy that is Africa’s second-largest trading partner after the EU. Networks between sanctioned countries outside the regulated financial system are thriving. Gold, an unfreezable asset, has become a crucial part of how countries such as Russia, Venezuela and Iran engage in an international barter system.

In this new context, enforcement becomes crucial, but may be impossible. After their dismissal of the ICC and ICJ calls on Israel to comply with international law, how can the US and its partners make a convincing case again that their rules are fair and universal, and so must be followed by all? It is brazenly clear that the rules-based order is not about democratic values, the rule of law and the sanctity of human lives, but the observance of a global hierarchy in which some lives are sacred and others are not.

One day, the Gaza war will be over. And what will confront Israel’s allies is a world in which that logic, now plainly stated, is rejected once and for all. The stakes are higher than they realise. They will reap not only moral disgrace, but the crumbling of their entire postwar world order.

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Retailers are being urged to stop making everyday products such as drinks bottles, outdoor furniture and toys out of brightly coloured plastic after researchers found it degrades into microplastics faster than plainer colours.

Red, blue and green plastic became “very brittle and fragmented”, while black, white and silver samples were “largely unaffected” over a three-year period, according to the findings of the University of Leicester-led project.

The scale of environmental pollution caused by plastic waste means that microplastics, or tiny plastic particles, are everywhere. Indeed, they were recently found in human testicles, with scientists suggesting a possible link to declining sperm counts in men.

In this case, scientists from the UK and the University of Cape Town in South Africa used complementary studies to show that plastics of the same composition degrade at different rates depending on the colour.

The UK researchers put bottle lids of various colours on the roof of a university building to be exposed to the sun and the elements for three years. The South African study used plastic items found on a remote beach.

“It’s amazing that samples left to weather on a rooftop in Leicester and those collected on a windswept beach at the southern tip of the African continent show similar results,” said Dr Sarah Key, who led the project.

“What the experiments showed is that even in a relatively cool and cloudy environment for only three years, huge differences can be seen in the formation of microplastics.”

This field study, published in the journal Environmental Pollution, is the first such proof of this effect. It suggests that retailers and manufacturers should give more consideration to the colour of short-lived plastics.

“I’ve often wondered why microplastics in beach sand often appear to be all the colours of the rainbow,” said Professor Sarah Gabbott, also from the University of Leicester, who co-authored the study.

“I assumed that my eyes were being deceived and that I was just seeing the more colourful microplastics because they were easier to spot. Turns out there really are likely to be more brightly coloured microplastics in the environment because those plastic items pigmented red, green and blue are more susceptible to being fragmented into millions of tiny yet colourful microplastic particles.”

Adam Herriott, senior specialist for plastics at the anti-waste charity Wrap, said coloured plastic had traditionally been used to make products stand out in the shops, but the organisation is already advising manufacturers to avoid pigments so that plastic can be recycled more easily.

“If you mix up the colours together, it comes out a weird grey or greenish colour,” he said. The research was another reason to do this. “If we can avoid those bright colours in food packaging, especially high litter items like crisp packets or bottle tops, it would be better.”

The findings demonstrate that the black, white and silver colourants protect the plastic from damaging ultraviolet (UV) radiation, whereas other pigments do not. UV damage changes the plastic’s polymer structure, making it brittle and susceptible to fragmentation.

“Manufacturers should consider both the recyclability of the material and the likelihood of it being littered when designing plastic items and packaging,” said Key. “For items that are used outdoors or extensively exposed to sunlight, such as plastic outdoor furniture, consider avoiding colours like red, green and blue to make them last as long as possible.”

A Scottish safari park has announced the birth of two female lemur pups native to Madagascar.

Nova and Evie, who are living at Blair Drummond safari and adventure park, near Stirling, were born on 14 April, and the park has now publicly announced their birth.

The six-week-old black-and-white ruffled lemurs are among as few as 1,000 remaining in the wild, with the species considered critically endangered.

They are known to have the second-loudest primate call in the animal kingdom, with howler monkeys the only louder species.

Their loud cry makes them more susceptible to capture for the illegal pet trade, and additional threats include hunting by locals and habitat destruction due to deforestation, logging and mining.

Blair Drummond participates in the European Endangered Species Breeding Programme in order to build the population of animals such as the lemurs.

The sisters are the third litter to be born at the park, with several of their siblings now in zoological establishments across the UK.

The park also collaborates with the conservation project Feedback Madagascar, which focuses on educating communities and protecting lemurs in their natural habitat.

The pups will eventually join the other lemurs at the park’s Lemur Land. Meanwhile, visitors can catch a glimpse of them in their indoor enclosure with their mother, Cali.

The twin sisters will later be rehomed as part of the breeding programme.

The zookeeper Lesley Rodger said: “We are overjoyed to welcome these two new arrivals to our lemur conspiracy. They are gaining confidence in their surroundings daily and are already testing their limb strength by hanging from branches in their aviary.

“Both pups are female, and based on our past experience, girls do tend to be more of a handful.

“We have named them Nova, meaning ‘new’, and Evie, meaning ‘life’.”

Donald Trump’s inner circle is stepping up efforts to woo Black and other minority voters, with a leading candidate to be his vice-presidential running mate claiming falsely on Sunday TV that Joe Biden was resegregating US public schools.

Tim Scott, the US senator from South Carolina who has been open about his desire to be on Trump’s ticket, made one of the most extreme claims yet. Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union show, he described President Biden as a supporter of educational segregation.

“We need four more years of common sense under Donald Trump, and not four more years of segregation under Joe Biden,” Scott, who is African American, said.

Asked by CNN host Dana Bash whether suggesting Biden was for segregation was going too far, Scott tried to justify the contention by saying that “the elimination of charter schools under Joe Biden resegregates schools in America”. He added that schools in the largest cities were being resegregated by “Joe Biden’s Department of Education which has halted the growth of charter schools that provide greater diversity”.

In fact, charter schools, which are publicly funded but which operate outside state school systems, are backed by federal government grants through the Charter Schools Program to the tune of $440m a year – a level that has remained unchanged since 2019 under the Trump administration. Scott’s argument that charter schools create more diversity is also open to question.

New research carried out by sociologists at Stanford University and the University of Southern California to mark 70 years of the landmark US supreme court ruling outlawing segregated schools, Brown v Board of Education, reveals that segregation has been creeping back up for the past 30 years. One of the main drivers of the revival, contrary to Scott’s claim, has been the rise of charter schools, the academics discovered.

In recent weeks Trump has stepped up his attempt to prise Black voters away from their long-standing support for the Democratic party. On Thursday, he staged a rally in the South Bronx, one of the most diverse and staunchly Democratic parts of the country, where 95% of the population is Black or Hispanic.

Trump made a brazen play for the support of Black voters at the rally, talking about “millions and millions of illegals coming into the country” who he said had a negative impact particularly on minority American communities. “African Americans are getting slaughtered. Hispanic Americans are being slaughtered,” he said.

The Trump campaign push comes as recent opinion polls indicate that his support among these demographic populations is climbing. The Pew Research Center found in a recent survey that 18% of Black voters were leaning for Trump, compared with the 8% of Black voters who voted for him in 2020.

The Biden campaign has responded to the apparent shift towards Trump by targeting negative political adverts accusing Trump of a track record of racism. Last week it released a 30-second ad that invoked the case of the Central Park Five, Black men who were wrongly convicted of raping a jogger in 1989.

Trump took out a full-page advert in local newspapers soon after the men were arrested, calling for New York to bring back the death penalty.

Six people who shared a meal involving black bear meat kebabs have been diagnosed with trichinellosis, a parasitic zoonotic disease.

In a new report released this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that in July 2022, a 29-year old hospitalized patient with suspected trichinellosis was reported to the Minnesota health department. His symptoms included fever, severe muscle aches, periorbital edema or eye swelling, and eosinophilia or the condition of elevated levels of eosinophils, a type of white blood cell.

According to the report, a week prior to the symptoms appearing, the patient and eight other people shared a meal that included the meat of a black bear which had been frozen for 45 days before being grilled and served rare with vegetables that had been cooked with the meat.

An investigation into the incident found six trichinellosis cases, including two in people who consumed only the vegetables. Trichinellosis is a parasitic infection caused by the larvae of trichinella, a type of roundworm. Typically, meat contaminated with the trichinella larvae comes from carnivorous animals such as bears, wild boars or walrus.

Molecular testing found that larvae from the bear meat had been frozen in a household freezer for more than 15 weeks and that the larvae was trichinella nativa, a freeze-resistant species. The CDC warns that adequate cooking is the only reliable way to kill trichinella parasites and that infected meat can cross-contaminate other foods.

The CDC reports that six days before the symptom onset in the initial patient, he and eight extended family members from Arizona, Minnesota and South Dakota gathered in South Dakota for several days. During their gathering, they ate the meat from a black bear which had been harvested by one of the family members in northern Saskatchewan, Canada, in May 2022.

According to the report, the meat was “initially inadvertently served rare, reportedly because the meat was dark in color, and it was difficult for the family members to visually ascertain the level of doneness”.

It added: “After some of the family members began eating the meat and noticed that it was undercooked, the meat was recooked before being served again.”

Three of the six symptomatic people, two of whom sought care at least twice before being offered treatment, were hospitalized. All three patients received trichinellosis-directed treatment with albendazole, a medication for the treatment of a variety of parasitic worm infections.

All six symptomatic people recovered, with the CDC reporting that the non-hospitalized patients did not receive trichinellosis-directed treatment because their symptoms had resolved with supportive care only.

Across the US, trichinellosis is rarely reported. Most of the cases that are reported relate to the consumption of meat from wild game.

From January 2016 to December 2022, there were seven trichinellosis outbreaks in the US that were reported to the CDC, including 35 probable and confirmed cases. Bear meat was the suspected or confirmed source of infection for the majority of these outbreaks, the CDC said.