Why Hasn’t a Vaccine Stopped Salmonella?
We have the vaccine. Why do over a million US residents get sick each year?
During college, I spent several weeks binge-watching the show Good Eats, hosted by Alton Brown. The show helped me learn many of the basics of cooking, including valuable lessons like mixing dry ingredients before adding wet ones, the importance of salting food — and being very, very careful with raw chicken.
Raw chicken is often contaminated with a nasty bacterium called Salmonella, whose full name is Salmonella enterica. This bacterium gets many people sick each year — an estimated 1.35 million infections happen in the United States each year, with an estimated 420 deaths per year.
Salmonella’s influence in our kitchens goes beyond raw chicken — it’s also the reason why U.S. eggs need to be refrigerated. In order to minimize the spread of the virus, we wash our eggs in the States, which scrubs off the outer layer and makes them more vulnerable to bacterial growth.
But why do we treat chickens differently in the U.S. than in Europe? Why do U.S. producers need to clean their eggs, while European egg producers don’t?
Let’s find out a bit more about salmonella, chicken sanitation, and why our U.S. eggs need to stay in a fridge.
