Worms in your sushi

Carl Zimmer, of the very excellent blog the Loom, has a post about Anisakiosis, a type of food poisoning caused by a parasitic worm, Anisaki, and contracted by eating raw fish. In addition to plenty of fascinating information on Anisaki and the symptoms that it causes, there's a video of a colony of Anisaki wriggling in a box of fish. Has my chirashizushi been contaminated by unwanted parasitic worm proteins?

In the comments, someone asserts that freezing kills Anisaki, and sushi fish in the UK generally has been frozen before (at least in the sushi lunch bar - Wasabi - near work). This is probably true of cheap inferior restaurants, but perhaps not of good ones. I wonder if my usual haunts serve frozen fish?

Disclaimer - I've never been poisoned by seafood, raw, cooked, shellfish or fish. Mum, unfortunately, contracted food poisoning last weekend from eating her first two cockles in years. Maybe I've built up a tolerance from eating the following:

Uni sushi (sea urchin roe on rice and seaweed) - sea urchins are spiky because they taste good. Non-spiky urchins got slurped up by discerning piscine palates millions of years ago. Fish love them. I do too.

Chirashizushi (sashimi on a bed of rice) - salmon, o-toro, shiro maguro, lots of variations. Raw fish and rice. Yum yum.

Steamed cockles (semi-raw and dripping with juice) - last had them in Newton Hawker Centre, Singapore in December 2007. Get your Hepatitis A vaccinations first.

O chien (oyster omelette) - the nice man in Taman Sri Tebrau Hawker Centre, Johor Bahru, Malaysia, serves up nice and fat ones, still juicy and raw, in a greasy yummy bed of flour and egg. This is the best way to eat oysters. The second best is raw with a squeeze of lemon and shallot vinegar.

Baigai snails (fried with XO sauce and garlic) - there's a live seafood place in KL that does these. They are white and come from Japan. Little sweet morsels of pale juicy flesh. They aren't actually supposed to be raw, but like all seafood underdone is better than overdone, and they are still full of salty seawater goodness.

Warning: Do NOT eat the "o chien" at Newton in Singapore - it's terrible. The reason why people say it's good is because they haven't been across the border.