Medically speaking, most times the danger you know and can deal with appropriately is much safer than the dangers you are unaware of.
If you don't want to take any chance, then a person should probably not eat any uncooked meat, drink any mountain stream water, or skin any animals without rubber gloves. I've seen far more cases of campylobacter, samonella, and vibrio cholera infection from undercooked contaminated hamburger and shellfish and raw unrefrigerated milk, than cases of trichinosis. You are pretty safe from these bacterial infections with beef/elk/deer cooked rare in the steak form, but then you still run a small risk of prion/chronic wasting infection/mad cow disease from eating these steaks which are lightly cooked. Also, anyone who has ever lived and worked on a ranch, knows that sick cows usually go to the butcher, because they are not good for anything else after all.
>95% of the cases of these food born and water born infections (i.e. Giardia, cryptosporidium, etc.) that I have seen are associated with people not using a water filter, refrigerating items appropriately, or cooking things appropriately. Are all of these precautions full proof? No, but they do lessen the risk significantly, and your body can usually deal with a certain level/load of pathogenic bacteria without getting infectious symptoms. Also, you can get trichinosis from poultry even apparently, but I haven't seen that.
I must say, I am a "wussy", I don't eat any uncooked meat at all, but would eat and have eaten cooked bear meat. I filter all water (why not, it's so easy, and is psychologically reassuring even if not 100% effective). I do live on the wild side and often skin animals bare-handed or just wear light leather gloves to reduce the risk of getting a serious laceration in the backcountry. I've only ever seen one serious infection from skinning though, and it wasn't big game, but rather the classic Tularemia from a guy who had been skinning wild rabbits.
