why eating undercooked chicken is like drinking out of the sewer
There's an article in the Seattle Times about a recent food safelty study showing that 80% of supermarket chickens test positive for pathogenic bacteria, mostly salmonella and camplyobacter, with antibiotic resistant staph making a showing as well. This isn't really news, other studies have had similar findings (a colleague of mine at VT did a study on pig livers in local grocery stores, and found about 20% harbored Hepatitis E virus). And this is why we cook our food, and avoid cross-contaminating salads with raw meat juice. But, of note, organic meats are just as likely to contain pathogenic bacteria, so just because you get expensive organic chickens, don't assume they're free of scary bugs (though they might plausibly be less likey to be antibiotic resistant bugs, at least). The only sorbitol-negative E. coli I ever saw at necropsy was in an organic-raised lamb (the nasty strains of E. coli are all sorbitol-negative).
I'm sort of ambivalent on the whole organinc meat thing. On the one hand, using antibiotics as 'growth enhancers' is, I think, poor practice, and promotes antibiotic resistance. On the other, judicious, medically correct use of antibiotics in food animals is a good idea. We have withdrawal periods on these drugs, and if they're followed (and someone's license is at stake if they aren't), we shouldn't be seeing significant drug residues in meat. On the whole, I'd rather we focused on animal welfare, and appropriate (lack of) density in raising food animals rather than cramming them shoulder to shoulder in deep poop, than on being organic per se. That should result in less morbidity, anyway, and in the end less need for antibiotics. But I object to the idea that just because something was raised organic and free range, that the meat is therefore 'clean'. It's not. Bacteria don't care about the organic label on the package.
This particularly alarms me when I hear folks talking about raw meat diets for their pets, and these are the same folk who tend to associate organic with safe. Dogs are more resistant to salmonella than we are, but I lost a canine patient who'd eaten a raw chicken to salmonella; there was just too much damage to her gut. It's a very nasty bug, once it gets hold; it kills the gut lining, and then lymphatic tissue, so you're less able to mount a defense.
Yes it's been a slow day so far, why do you ask?
I'm sort of ambivalent on the whole organinc meat thing. On the one hand, using antibiotics as 'growth enhancers' is, I think, poor practice, and promotes antibiotic resistance. On the other, judicious, medically correct use of antibiotics in food animals is a good idea. We have withdrawal periods on these drugs, and if they're followed (and someone's license is at stake if they aren't), we shouldn't be seeing significant drug residues in meat. On the whole, I'd rather we focused on animal welfare, and appropriate (lack of) density in raising food animals rather than cramming them shoulder to shoulder in deep poop, than on being organic per se. That should result in less morbidity, anyway, and in the end less need for antibiotics. But I object to the idea that just because something was raised organic and free range, that the meat is therefore 'clean'. It's not. Bacteria don't care about the organic label on the package.
This particularly alarms me when I hear folks talking about raw meat diets for their pets, and these are the same folk who tend to associate organic with safe. Dogs are more resistant to salmonella than we are, but I lost a canine patient who'd eaten a raw chicken to salmonella; there was just too much damage to her gut. It's a very nasty bug, once it gets hold; it kills the gut lining, and then lymphatic tissue, so you're less able to mount a defense.
Yes it's been a slow day so far, why do you ask?