Don't eat Canadian bears: French health officials

France's health watchdogs have issued an unusual warning about bear meat, citing the case of French hunters who shot a bear in Canada, ate the meat and then fell violently sick with a parasitic disease.

Twenty-four people set down to a feast near Orleans, central France, to tuck into the bear, whose meat had been brought back from Canada by the hunters.

Seventeen of them fell sick with trichinellosis, an intestinal infection caused by eating meat with microscopic larvae. Eight of the 17 needed to be hospitalised, some of them for nearly two weeks.