Comment by Benjamin_Dobell
7 years ago
From the article:
> Why go to the trouble of washing eggs? A lot of it has to do with fear of salmonella.
> [...]
> eggs contaminated with salmonella are responsible for about 142,000 illnesses a year in the U.S., according to the Food and Drug Administration
So let me get this straight: back in 2014, despite egg washing being a practice for decades, there were STILL 142,000 people getting ill from them each year?
Sounds like 2014 had some solid data on the fact that it was a pointless practice.
Surely you'd need to know how many people get Salmonella poisoning from non-washed eggs (either historically or elsewhere in the world) to draw this conclusion.
Here in the UK we don't wash our eggs as part of the production process. We have a "British Lion" safety mark on British-produced eggs as part of our food standards. Recently they were declared safe to eat raw even if you're pregnant as there were no cases of salmonella linked to them in 2016.
Germany had 12'000 cases of salmonella in 2016, 14'000 in 2017. USA has 300 Megacitizens, Germany 80. Germany vaccinates the chickens and does not wash or refrigerate eggs in the supermarket.
So, atleast in germany, you're 3 times less likely to get infected by salmonella, relative to the population.
I would however note that there is no reliable statistic on how many of those are due to eggs and how many are from other sources, considering meat and other products can carry it as well.
You can just look towards most of Europe for that data, only a few countries wash their eggs here.
Surely the rest of the world not washing their eggs means that you have those statistics freely available from any number of modern record-keeping nations, like France, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and so on and so forth?
What's even more amazing is that we address Salmonella by washing eggs rather than vaccinating hens. In many European countries, all laying hens are vaccinated, and you can make and eat raw eggs in all kinds of great things like chocolate mousse without worrying about Salmonella.
It's genuinely baffling.
EU has a higher salmonella rate than the USA.
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It's not the washing that does anything, it's the fridge - it keeps the salmonella from growing.
Other countries immunize their chickens. In the US only about half the chickens are immunized.
The washing does to something; eggs have a protective layer on the outside. Washing them removes it. With this layer, an egg cannot be invaded by bacteria after it's been laid.
Vaccinating the chickens and keeping the eggs unwashed is basically as much natural protection as you can get from nature, washing them means you have to protect the egg yourself a lot more, otherwise salmonella and other bacteria can infect it.
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This is genuinely incredible to me - with all the problems the US (among others) has with using broad-spectrum treatments to improve animal growth, we can't be bothered to vaccinate them?
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