A few columns ago, I told about drinking unpasteurized milk or other types of unpasteurized dairy products. This time, I’ve got new data on meat product safety that gives me the chance to tell about meat industry safety as we go full bore into grilling season.
Remember that proper food handling and safe cooking practices in the home are the absolute most important part of food safety. Properly stored and thoroughly cooked meat products will be safe to eat, even in the odd chance that they had a positive microbial incidence.
The first study I want to summarize is the just-released 2012 salmonella testing data from the nearly 31,000 random samples collected across the U.S. from the meat and poultry packing industry by the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. Overall, the incidence of salmonella was down from 2011, indicating that new techniques are working to help minimize bacterial contamination of the food supply.
As expected, poultry still has the highest incidence of positive tests, at 4.3 percent total. Hogs tested at 1.3 percent positive incidence, and beef’s total incidence was lowest, at less than 1 percent. Ground meat products have higher salmonella incidence than whole cuts, with ground chicken incidence at 4.3 percent and ground beef at 1.9 percent, both down significantly as well.
The second study can be found at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. Written by Painter, et al., it is titled, “Attribution of foodborne illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths to food commodities by using outbreak data, United Stated, 1998-2008.” If you can get past the title, it’s pretty interesting. I will share a couple of the most interesting points and let you delve into the article if you want.
The most interesting fact, to me, is that plant-based foods cause more foodborne illness than animal-based foods, but only by a 51 to 48 percent margin. Within the animal products classes, the fish/shellfish types caused 6.1 percent of illnesses; dairy products caused 13.8 percent; eggs caused 6 percent; and all meat products together caused 22 percent of illnesses. This includes all illnesses, whether caused by bacteria, virus, chemical contamination or parasites.
Within the meat types, bacterial contamination was involved in 71 percent of cases, chemicals in 10 percent, parasites in only 0.007 percent, and viruses in 28 percent (note that some cases had multiple contaminants).
What does all this mean? Inherently, it means that our food system does work to help keep us safe, but that there still may be opportunities to improve. Irradiation of food products may be one possibility, but that is not a widely accepted technology yet, even though it essentially eliminates microbial contamination.
All in all, it is still up to us to make sure we practice proper storage and thorough cooking to eliminate the opportunity for problems.
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