Canadian chickens have lots of antibiotic resistant bacteria, apparently (and I’d assume American chicken does too). How worried should I be? I handle raw meat very carefully, and cook my chicken fully. What do you think? Are you worried, or is this another example of junk science?
I’m a physician who treats patients with MRSA at least weekly, and I’m not worried. Just cook the food properly. That way it won’t matter what organism the dead bacteria was resistant to.
That, and wash your hands thoroughly after handling raw meat.
Don’t let objects that touch raw meat to touch food that won’t be cooked further, or plates that food will be served on.
Clean up with soap and water. If you don’t use a dishwasher allow all items wash to thoroughly air dry.
If you’re really worried, just stop eating chicken sashimi. While evolution is an amazing thing, bacteria have yet to evolve resistance to a nice hot pan.
What they said. Cook it well, don’t cross-contaminate. It’s important to that extent.
It isn’t unrealistic to assume that handling raw poultry frequently would increase the probability that you would become colonized by MRSA, provided MRSA actually exists commonly on raw chicken. That doesn’t necessarily mean you would immediately become sick though.
Honestly? No more or less than you worry about fresh vegetables. Food-born pathogens are everywhere; chicken, especially, gets a bad rap. And it deserves it - it, like much of the food we eat, is at risk for any number of scary things.
The good news is that properly cooked food carries almost no threat of illness. Unfortunately, “properly cooked” is hard to define; spinach has just as much of a chance to be coated with E. Coli. as any piece of meat in your kitchen, and we often don’t cook spinach at all. Meat, of course, we cook, but how long to cook and at what temperature is a total crap shoot. The USDA, the FDA, and the US Code of Federal Regulations all disagree as to what temperature and time is required to safely cook chicken.
And even grosser is that one of the biggest risks you find in your kitchen is not what comes in with the food, but what ends up on the food from contamination in your kitchen. As one book I recently read put it, we are “swimming in fecal matter.” It’s everywhere. I think the best you can do as a home cook who cares about food quality & taste as well as safety is to use your best judgement, disinfect your counters, cutting boards, and anything else that comes in contact with food, and (above all) wash your hands. Wash 'em a lot, wash 'em well, use a nail brush, scrub for 30 seconds or more. Wash them in between handling different foods, wash 'em every single time you go to the bathroom. I think that one thing will do more for any sort of food safety than any other thing that you can do.
(and yes, now that you ask, I have been reading about food safety lately. How did you guess? :D)
I’d worry about enterotoxin-producing staph a lot more than MRSA–nothing’s gonna destroy the toxin. With chicken, campylobacter and salmonella are the big worries. Personally, I worry a lot more about raw food, or cross-contamination to raw food, than I ever do about meat.
That’s kind of what I thought - we’ve known for decades that chicken (and other meat) has bacteria, and that cooking takes care of them. My mom was scared by a tv program talking about this, and I wanted to get a fairly firm idea about it before I told her it’s as safe to eat chicken as it always was.
I used to be afraid to cook or handle raw chicken. Not scared and hiding under my bed afraid, but genuinely concerned about food-borne pathogens.
Then I started cooking chicken. This sounds naive and childish in retrospect, but I really was concerned about cooking chicken. Now? Pfft. Wipe the counter down when you’re done preparing raw chicken. A bit of Formula 409 is more than enough.
I make beer at home. Almost everyone who does this is terrified of CONTAMINATION! It’s pretty ridiculous. I mean, I sterilize shit. Not with expensive cleansers sold for the purpose, but with a 100:1 bleach/water solution. The fucking yeast package asks for sterilized scissors to cut it open. Are you shitting me?
Never had a batch contaminated. Do you people realize that we’ve been making beer for literally THOUSANDS of years? Before the concepts of germs or pathogens even existed? I get that contamination is a potential problem, but the lengths that people are concerned about it literally prevent people from trying home brewing as a hobby. Absolutely ridiculous.
Same is true for for chicken. And people are still afraid of pork that isn’t cooked until it’s one step shy of ash. In almost 40 years on this planet, I’ve had two cases of honest-to-god food poisoning. It’s hardly worth worrying about.
I’ve had a batch contaminated. It fucking sucks to throw out beer that could have been good. 
And swap out your plastic gear now and then, because stuff gets into microabrasions that no sanitizer will get out.
At least with beer, nothing’s going to grow in there that you won’t be able to tell right away that it’s messed up, and it won’t kill you. You can’t say that about undercooked chicken, cross-contamination, the aforementioned staph and e. coli, etc.
Oh, and pork fears are seriously overblown in the US. These days, trich is damned near wiped out in domestic pork; you have to worry a lot more about it in wild game.
I bet it does suck to throw away $35-50 worth of ingredients that could have been delicious beer under different circumstances. I’m just saying, the risk is way, way overblown and I’ve talked to three different people who have been scared away from the hobby by CONTAMINATION fear mongers when they were otherwise interested in the hobby. I don’t deny that beer can get contaminated, but it’s not common or likely.
Wash your equipment. Before use, wipe it down with a bleach solution, rinse it with hot water and stop worrying. Relax, and have a home-brew. 
I’m not worried about death by food, period. I won’t die from undercooked chicken, I can almost 100% promise you. Staphylococcus in its food-borne varieties isn’t fatal very often, e. coli isn’t very common or fatal in most cases, and cross-contamination is a term that really descibes nothing.
If you die of food-borne illness, odds are your days were numbered already.
Yes, most people don’t have to worry much, but there are at-risk people (you’d be surprised by how many people are on immunosuppressive drugs), there are people who are fucking stupid at food prep and won’t die but will create lots of avoidable mild illnesses, and there are people who simply aren’t up to date on what’s OK these days (c.f. “undercooked” pork).
I don’t brew these days, but it’s because I loathe bottling/bottle washing more than I like homebrew (it’s deep and abiding, I tell you) and don’t want to invest in kegging atm. So it goes. I haven’t seen any beer sanitizing hysteria personally, and the cleansers I used last smell better than bleach, and aren’t expensive, so I’m good with that.
I just get a tad questioning when people start running down the “that’s what your immune system is FOR!” path because some people use it as an excuse to chop the salad with the knife just used on the raw chicken and sneer at any proper cleaning.
LOL - when I visited Germany my friend Christian was so cute because he was assuring me that the sausage that was cooked with a bit of pink inside was safe =) I already knew it, and wasn’t worried about it.
And the classical way to make beer historically was sometimes saving some old dough impregnated with yeast, or beer lees with live yeast, or just exposing the jar of wort to the air until it picked up the yeast to brew. [that is why I avoid certain belgian cork beers, they use the open to the air to innoculate method and i have some allergies they might trigger.]
I have a few friends who are on immunosupressants, so I tend to take a bit more care than a lot of people.
It really isn’t rocket science - and I was brought up to wash my hands frequently, especially after I use the bathroom …
My immune system is in pretty good shape but I don’t enjoy food poisoning. I’ll avoid it, thanks.
There’s no reason to “worry” about food bacteria. Just follow the precautions: prevent cross-contamination & cook things sufficiently.
I read a case study about a guy who died from using the same knife to butter a piece of bread (which he then ate) that he had just used to cut some raw pork*. Botulism toxin (found in canning) is one of the most potent toxins known. That’s where things get sticky when talking about food dangers; most dangers are very slight and hardly worth worrying about, and others are very serious and to be avoided at all costs. The trick is deciding where each danger falls on the spectrum, I guess.
*This case study was from quite a while ago.
Oh yeah, I will admit to being seriously picky about home canning because hey, botulism risk. Why the hell would you want to risk botulism over some improperly canned produce? You’re not stocking up for a long winter far from other food sources or something dramatic like that.
There are a lot of things people do that are potentially deadly, not just canning. Home canning can be done safely IF done properly… just like home brewing and raw meat preparation.
I don’t think I get overly worked up about risks in food. I do take reasonable precautions, like washing with soap and water and using bleach to sanitize things when appropriate, because that’s sensible and fairly easy and cheap.
On the other hand, a bout of norovirus in 2007 landed me in the hospital for a week, so food borne illness can and does happen. And I picked that up at a restaurant, not my own home - so much for the idea of commercial or professional food prep somehow being inherently safer than home prep.
Really, all you can do is take reasonable precautions and, if you do get sick, go to a doctor.
Just clarifying: everything I’ve read says that the dangers of infected beer involve crappy-looking and nasty-tasting beer, and cost from replacing your ingredients and maybe some of your minor gear pieces like tubing or buckets. It sucks, but you will definitely know that your beer has gone bad, and you will figure that out before consuming enough to make you sick - in most cases, seeing or smelling would be enough, otherwise a sip will do. Plus everything I’ve read says that you can’t grow anything in beer that’ll kill you.
This is to be distinguished from the illegal-in-the-US practice of home distilling, which has more unique hazards like still explosions and potential of methanol contamination (yay, blindness and death risks) if you suck at it. Suck at homebrewing and you’ll just make shitty beer.