Bacterial Contaminants of Poultry Meat: Sources, Species, and Dynamics
2. Sources of Contamination
While muscles are sterile in healthy living birds, various microbiotas are hosted in the digestive tract, lungs, skin, feathers, etc. In slaughterhouses, the surfaces, air (aerosols), and liquids also encompass bacteria. Therefore, carcasses and cuts after animal killing can be contaminated by animal and slaughterhouse environment microbiota. Figure 1 summarizes the different steps in poultry slaughtering and the associated contamination routes. Although there are some differences between the practices in large-scale commercial slaughterhouses and small-scale slaughtering facilities, the main steps of poultry slaughtering are similar. Compared to the slaughtering process of mammals, the main differences to be noted for poultry slaughtering are (i) the use of a water bath (hot or chilled) at different stages of the process; (ii) the feather removal step, which can be mechanical and is performed differently from removing the skin of mammals; (iii) the small size of birds (compared to cattle or sheep, for example) which has consequences on the ease of carcass manipulation and the mechanization of some processes.
We should check with the chickens for their preferred term but ‘loosefleshed, pathogen homestead’ probably isn’t it, either.
Thank you for this!
While trichinosis due to eating pork has become very uncommon, the disease has not been eliminated in the U.S. - the practice of raising pigs outdoors in close proximity to rodents and other wildlife elevates the risk to consumers.
While I enjoy bacon, pulled pork and carnitas (among other porcine preparations), I still won’t eat undercooked pork, thanks largely to a Berton Roueche story that appeared in the New Yorker circa 1940, about a Schlachtfest (pork feast) that went disastrously wrong. There’s a summary of the events here.*
*the account is slightly off base in that multiple men involved in preparing the sausage became ill; one of them died.
Bear meat, and meat that was prepared in the same meat-grinder as bear meat, is currently the leading source of trichinosis in the US, i believe. Trichinosis in pork almost disappeared until “pastured” pork became trendy. Sadly, giving your swine access to plants and mud also gives them access to pathogens that they can’t pick up in a concrete bunker. I still buy pastured pork (when i buy pork at all) because the ethics of commercial pork production bother me more than for any other meat i eat. But if you are buying ordinary commercial pork from a factory farm, the risk of eating it rare is pretty low.
I was going to post a link about how to prevent catching trichinosis, but yours is better:
I’m highlighting it for those who don’t notice embedded links.
And don’t forget, make sure your walrus is well done.
I don’t eat it because I like the taste of pork cooked well. A roast might be a little reddish still in the center, but more well done than 145°F.
Whereas I’ve discovered that medium pork is much tastier than well done pork. 
Don’t forget steak tartare
Per the OP, it is now clear as mud as to why the variance in safe cook temperatures for meats in most commercially purchased “proteins” in the USA (poultry, beef, pork, fish).
Oddball variants aside- as in wild game consumption and the resulting rare pathogens like trichinosis and blue tongue in deer- are not generally speaking primarily concerned with the common variants of Salmonella, E. Coli, Campylobacter, et-al that are monitored by the USDA in our usual consumption on a daily basis.
My question was simply:… Why does it take 160 degrees core temperature in a chicken VS 130 core degrees in beef to be considered safe when considering the same pathogen?
Bluetongue (or the closely related epizootic hemorrhagic disease) is not a concern for humans at all, but can be devastating for the populations of ungulates.
A lot of this has to do with the conditions that poultry is raised and slaughtered in that can promote those particular diseases. The other reason usually explained is due to differing densities of the meat. You can age beef or venison for a long time, this is not usually done with poultry - although a mostly died-out practice is to hang whole birds ungutted and unplucked for <1 week.
I was unaware that consumption of blue tongue deer meat was harmless, interesting.
“A lot of this has to do with the conditions that poultry is raised and slaughtered in that can promote those particular diseases.”
OK. But how does that affect the temperature that these diseases can be neutralized?
Presumably: bacteria can penetrate the insides of poultry easier than meat, so by the time it arrives in your fridge, you cannot easily guarantee that salmonella or others aren’t “inside” the poultry, and cooking to 165 in the center determines it’s gone. Maybe 99/100 chickens don’t have this problem, but the 1% chance is too high to recommend anything else.
Note that food can be immediately removed from heat when the temperature is reached, even if it is only at that temperature for a second. You can in many cases cook to a much lower temperature and then hold it at that temperature for a period of time, but in most cases this is very hard to guarantee. More modern techniques like dedicated sous vide machines make this somewhat easier to guarantee, but they’d still have to test this a bunch.
It’s actually quite easy in any large hunk-o-meat. It’s called “resting”. If you are in the habit of using meat thermometers and leaving them in the roast until it’s time to bring it to the table, you easily see that the interior of a roast increases in temperature for a while after being removed from the oven, and stays hot for upwards of an hour. Once i learned about the extended FDA safe temp tables, i started cooking most poultry to lower temperatures. In many cases, you only need to hold the meat for 3-5 minutes at temp to complete the pasteurization.
Two big differences: which pathogens are common in a particular animal and how dense the meat is.
I’d earlier said ‘loosefleshed pathogen homestead’ in jest but that’s my understanding.
[Speculation] Birds have less densely packed muscles and a ‘leak’ into one part of the body is more easily scooted around inside, reproducing and excreting all the way. And, as a home cook, this matches intuition, chicken meat is kinda wet & slippery. This is one reason tattooing on chickens and turkeys is unpopular, though not the biggest reason.
Right but: the USDA and FDA say cook to a specific temperature, then remove from heat. They recommend a 3 minute (seems short?) rest for beef, pork, lamb, but not poultry. So according to them that’s not right, but I think both of us would rather cook to preference, which is good enough.
If you download appendix A of this FDA document
And scroll to page 35, you will see that in addition to the “simplified” guidelines the FDA promulgates to consumers, they also have much more complicated guidelines that they publish for the primary benefit of commercial food handlers. This is the source of most of the sous vide recommendations. So no, the FDA doesn’t say
That’s their simplified advice. It’s one safe way of cooking meat, according to the FDA. Not the only way. And they don’t have any objections to resting meat longer, unless it cools below 130F. They are just saying that once you cook it that hot, it’s safe to eat immediately.
My guess is they think most people want to cook and then immediately serve. 
Or they don’t trust ordinary people to pay attention.
If the meat was processed in a hygienic facility, has been cooled throughout, and is consumed fresh, then it’s safe to eat even in a raw state; after all, steak tartare is a thing. I guess the problem is that meat distributors usually don’t assume that their product would be eaten raw and therefore don’t take the necessary precautions.
That’s not true. They’re always going to try to make sure the meat is as safe as possible. Saying ‘steak tartare is a thing’ isn’t much different than saying ‘we didn’t wear seat belts when I was a kid and we survived just fine’. Meat producers, are not only inspected, nearly constantly, by the USDA, the USDA will have an office inside the plant. I know local people that have either the USDA or DATCP (the department in Wisconsin that handles this on at the state level) in their business because of what they do and, from what I understand, it’s a PITA to have them over your shoulder all the time. Note I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, just that it’s a PITA. They’re going to be doing their own testing and their own inspecting. If you change something about the process that will require changes to your HACCP, they’re going to be involved in that. If you decide to disregard them…you’re going to go out of business. I’ve seen that a few times as well.
Watch a documentary or youtube video on the nightly cleaning these places go through. It’s like running the entire production floor through a car wash.
