I posted this in a reply, but I’m reposting it here:

Bacon is already cooked when you buy it from the store (at least in america). The difference between “pork belly” and “bacon” is that bacon is cured and then smoked. That smoking process gets the temperature above the range to cook it.

Besides, even “chewy” bacon is going to get above the recommended pork cooking temp. It’s so thin, it will reach that temperature very quickly. If it gets hot enough to start rendering the fat, it’s definitely hot enough, and I have a hard time believing anyone would pull bacon out of the oven before it’s had time to render some fat.

If you read the case report by the docs, they don’t say “we think he got this disease from bacon”.

Our patient’s lifelong preference for soft bacon may have led to instances of undercooked bacon consumption, but this would have caused him to develop taeniasis, an intestinal tapeworm, and not cysticercosis [1]. Taeniasis occurs when consuming undercooked pork and the larval cysts embedded within, while cysticercosis is contracted when humans ingest eggs found in the feces of other humans with taeniasis [1].

In other words, the brain version only comes from eating the eggs, which can only come from eating poop of someone who had the intestinal worms. They later specify that they think the most likely scenario is that he got the intestinal version, re-infected himself through the fecal-oral pathway, then somehow cured himself of the intestinal version.

Personally, I think the most likely scenario is that he got the parasite the same way you get any other disease that uses the fecal-oral pathway: contact with someone’s inadequately washed hands, or eating food prepared by someone with inadequately washed hands.