Garden slugs no delicacy

While escargot is the pride of French cuisine, eating common garden slugs or snails can be fatal.

The Medical Journal of Australia reports the case of a patient with mysterious symptoms who was found to have eaten two garden slugs for a dare.

His plight puzzled doctors until repeated questioning extracted the confession that five weeks earlier he had eaten two slugs from a Sydney garden.

They are hosts of the larval stage of a lung worm parasite, and the man was diagnosed with human eosinophilic meningitis.

He has since recovered.