Related to another post here, I’m wondering about an assertion made by our butcher. I had asked him about the recent salmonella scare regarding ground turkey. He said that just about everything you buy probably has some salmonella in it. “Cook stuff. That’s how you deal with it,” is pretty much what he said. But what’s the straight dope?
Yes. Food poisoning pathogens, including salmonella, are pretty much everywhere. For example, you certainly have some living quite harmlessly on your skin and scalp, right now. It’s only when they get the opportunity for runaway reproduction in suitable foodstuffs, stored at suitable temperatures, that they become a problem.
Yes.
The egg risk is overwrought: I believe the odds are something in the line of 1:10,000 eggs. The worst meats are chicken (and campylobacter is more of a risk in chicken, IIRC) and ground beef. Turkey is slightly more safe regarding salmonella, as is pork. (Pork may have a false track record of safety because people worry about trichinosis.) But I wouldn’t eat any of the above undercooked unless I knew their source.
I always read that salmonella is on the outside of the egg, not the inside. And when you break it the egg comes into contact with the salmonella on the outside and contaminates it. Is this so?
The last time I checked there were 1840 species of Salmonella of which 38 are considered disease causing species. Yes, the Salmonella, if present, is on the outside of the egg and should be no problem if the egg is cooked immediately and not recontaminated with the organism from the outside the egg.
While historically, it has been true that salmonella has been found only on the outside of eggs, in the last few decades, some strains have picked up the ability to infect intracellularly, and they have been found in the interior. How prevalent those strains are I couldn’t say.
One important thing to keep in mind, is that there is a difference between a Salmonella bug (or other pathogen) here or there and a glob of thousands of them in one place. The stomach acids and other bodily defenses can take care of the odd bad bug. But if the numbers are high enough, then some can sneak by and start multiplying.
Ditto borderline cooking temps. If the temp inside kills only 99.9% of the bugs, that’s good enough for most background bugs, but if there’s a whole lot of them in the meat, that’s not good enough.
Also, some people are in better condition to repel things. And the ones that can’t, are of course the ones that are going to have the hardest time once infected.
This is why recalls and such matter.