Pasteurization: Egg Safety in a Nutshell

If you’ve been watching the news over the past several months, you’ve probably come across some troubling stories about contaminated chicken.

The floodgates were opened with a Consumer Reports study from late 2013. Of 300 raw chicken breast samples taken from stores across the U.S., 97% were contaminated with harmful bacteria.

Numbers of this magnitude indicate this isn’t a fluke. It’s a serious food safety problem with contamination.

The numbers are reflected in cases of foodborne illness. Among bacteria, Salmonella are the number one cause of food borne illness in the U.S., resulting in more than 1 million illnesses, 19,000 hospitalizations, and 378 deaths every year.[1]

And the problem extends to one of our favorite breakfast foods – eggs.

Putting Egg Safety in the Spotlight

4 out of 5 Salmonella food poisoning cases come from raw or undercooked eggs.[2] For anyone who likes their eggs on the soft side, or raw in a homemade milk shake or Caesar salad dressing, these numbers are significant. There’s also the increased risk of cross-contamination in the kitchen even if eggs are cooked all the way through.

There’s actually a product already on the market that can virtually wipe out the risk of Salmonella making it from the farm to your breakfast plate – pasteurized eggs.

Pasteurization is nothing new. The milk you buy in the store is pasteurized. Liquid eggs are routinely pasteurized. And for a certain segment of the market, including high-risk populations like schools and assisted living facilities, eggs are pasteurized, too. But the majority of supermarket eggs are still unpasteurized.

The process is simple. Pasteurization heats the egg to a specific temperature that kills off Salmonella and other harmful pathogens like the Avian flu virus. Notably, it kills pathogens inside the shell too, so even undercooked and raw eggs are rendered safe to eat. And tests haven’t indicated any impact to nutrition or taste. It’s a big gain in egg safety with virtually no impact to the egg itself.

Egg Safety is Within Reach

The numbers indicate that some players in the poultry industry need to target Salmonella contamination in their operations. While pasteurization could be viewed as a Band-Aid solution that props up a damaged system, it’s not a chicken-and-egg scenario. Pasteurization isn’t the root cause of our contamination problems. But what it can do is help prevent millions of illnesses and hundreds of deaths worldwide.

[1] According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

[2] According to The Safest Choice™, a widely distributed brand of pasteurized eggs already in the U.S.

About the Author

Allie Gallant is a freelance writer and blogger.

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