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A young man in south China's Guangdong Province has fallen ill after eating raw snails, believing it can treat his insomnia.

The 23-year-old guy, surnamed Wen, was diagnosed with a type of angiostrongyliasis, a disease caused by parasites that affects the brain and spinal cord, and can lead to meningitis, the Disease Prevention and Control Center in Jiangmen City announced Saturday.

Wen's disease is the same as the 87 patients in Beijing, who had fallen ill after eating raw or half-cooked Amazonian snails contaminated with parasites at a Beijing restaurant serving Sichuan-style dishes.

Amazonian snails originate in South America and first came to China in the 1980s as a delicacy. The first patient to fall ill after eating the snails was reported in Guangzhou, capital city of south China's Guangdong Province.

The large, black snails are a hot-selling aquatic product in big Chinese cities like Beijing.

But the snails sending Wen to hospital are native species in Guangdong, which are twice bigger than Amazonian snails.

Wen, a migrant farmer worker from east China's Jiangxi Province, found on Aug. 1 a few snails in the grass and wall near the factory where he works in Jiangmen. He took out the snail meat and ate it raw.

Wen did so because his colleagues told him that eating raw snail meat can treat his insomnia.

He was sent to hospital limply on Aug. 5 with severe bellyache and low fever. He showed syndrome of meningitis and fell into deep coma on Aug. 15. His case was reported to the Jiangmen Disease Prevention and Control Center on Aug. 21, which later confirmed it to be a type of angiostrongyliasis,.

Three out of the four snails collected from around Wen's factory showed that one is containing about 6,000 parasites and the other two, at least 1,000, according to a research institute with the Guangzhou-based Zhongshan University.

Currently, a special medical team has been set up in Jiangmen's Wuyi Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine to treat Wen's disease which was described by experts as "severe."

(Xinhua News Agency August 28, 2006)