Sixty-seven live giant African snails
have been seized by US customs
agents.
The snails, which are prohibited in the US,
were found by Customs and Border
Protection (CBP) inspectors at Los Angeles
International Airport.
They arrived from Nigeria and were
intended for a person in California, said
Lee Harty, a spokeswoman for the
customs agency.
The molluscs are among the largest land
snails in the world and can grow up to
8ins (20cm) long, said officials.
The US Department of Agriculture put the
snails in an incinerator after they were
inspected, said Harty, because they can
carry parasites that are harmful to
humans, including one that can lead to
meningitis.
They are also potentially damaging to
nature, said Maveeda Mirza, the CBP
programme manager for agriculture.
"These snails are seriously harmful to local
plants because they will eat any kind of
crop they can get to," said Ms Mirza, who
added that investigations were continuing
into why one person would want so many.
"We're investigating what happened, but it
doesn't seem like there was smuggling
involved," she said.
This is the first time that they have
confiscated such a large quantity, she
added, although there have been cases of
much smaller numbers being found to be
accidentally in people's luggage.
www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-28304560

all in the name of parasite .

why is everytn Africa adjudged bad,poor,deathly n what av u? u cud use all the negative words here to qualify the noun**Africa**chek on dis..
www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19077138 **...

This is the kind that was chasing me. Xtralarge

I saw it on KTLA news yesterday. Oyibo people found it weird that Nigerians eat snails.

[quote author=Akbee][/quote]
they dont just like our swagg..they also blv dat our culture is primitive.. who cares?they can say n do whatever they deem fit..

That parasite that causes meningitis is putting it mildly....The parasite can pass through the meninges barrier of the brain which protects brain from infection....The damage it can cause is severe as in permanent nervous damage and also fatal coma....Where i lived in USA, Hawaii is tropical and has african snails brought there as well as other snails and slugs....One lady trying to be healthy ,ate fresh raw vegetables with undetected snail residue or tiny snails inside...She entered permanent coma after many months of severe pain in her body...Also a raw vegetable eating man was damaged but survived; but he walks very unstable and shaking very badly from nerve damage from the parasite eating his nerve tissue...
If USA does not have this disease there naturally, why would they want to allow it when they know how to prevent it?? Nervous system does not heal back like other tissue damage...Its often permanent..... There is a cure for the parasite infection but its hard to detect in time..And sometimes you can have the infection but its cannot be detected until it enters the spinal cord where they can do a painful spinal tap to sample nerve tissue from the spinal chord,,,Many people who get infected do not get it in their nervous systems and recover as the parasite cannot survive long in the body unless it finds its way to the nervous system...If it does not find the nervous system in the first week, it may never survive much longer than that... The nerve tissue in humans is very similar to Mollusk tissue and so the snail parasite thrives in nerve tissue..Rats also carry the parasite and pass from snail to rat or rat to snail and then to humans and other animals......