Photo by ginnerobot on flickr
Do you eat home made mayonnaise? Home made ice cream? Like to lick the bowl after making a cake or cookies? Have you thought about the possibility of food poisoning?
Every so often, there’s an outbreak of salmonella- induced food poisoning. And while on rare occasions it’s caused by something previously thought innocuous, like salad vegetables, most cases are related to poorly handled chicken or undercooked eggs.
Salmonella is a bacterium that infects animals, particularly poultry but also cattle and pigs. If people eat the live bacteria in sufficient quantities, it can cause intestinal infection and “food poisoning”. This is unpleasant for adults but potentially life threatening in the very young, very old, and immune compromised. In very rare cases it can trigger miscarriage in pregnant women. Salmonella is destroyed by heating the food to high temperatures, but obviously when food contains raw eggs, yolk or white, there is a risk. How much of a risk? It’s though about 1 in 20,000 eggs are contaminated with salmonella. There are things you as a consumer can do to reduce your risk.
- Buying organic or free range eggs ( More room to roam, less cross infection of salmonella in the hens that lay the eggs)
- Don’t use eggs that are cracked or dirty. (Washing dirt off eggs won’t help as washing the porous shell can actually push bacteria inside the shell rather than wash it away).
- Buy your eggs from a refrigerated shop and keep the eggs refrigerated at home. (Bacteria grow less when the temperature is colder).
- Use fresh eggs where ever possible, within their best before date.
Following these rules, it’s a risk I’m willing to accept but I wouldn’t serve raw egg to someone in one of the high risk groups. What do you think?