Foods Most Likely to Be Contaminated

There are a wide variety of bacteria that can be present in foods which can be harmful to humans. In most cases these threats are eliminated if the meat is thoroughly cooked. For the most part, the food supply is safe and there is very little reason to be concerned for your safety as a general rule. However, there are certain food groups which present a higher risk of contamination.

Beef and beef by-products fall into two very distinct groups. If you consume a steak, that steak came from a single cow and your only danger is if that individual cow was in some way infected. If you consume ground beef, the risk of contamination is much higher. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that meat from as many as 100 cows could be present in a single hamburger. Now, instead of an individual cow being infected, your risks is that any one of the 100 or more cows were infected. The odds are still very low, but substantially higher than with meat from a single source.

Milk is much the same way. The milk from hundreds of cows are mixed together during processing, then placed into the gallon jugs you purchase as the grocery store. When you eat a fried or hard boiled egg, you know it came from a single chicken, but this is not the case with all egg products. The egg mixture used by restaurants to make omelets is made from hundreds of eggs, coming from, you guessed it, hundreds of different chickens. Again, the overall risk to your health is minor, but those risks are increased when the number of animals contributing to the food increases.

Another food of concern are fruits and vegetables which are eaten raw. Washing these items does help, but washing cannot remove all contaminants. Alfalfa sprouts are a real concern as is the quality of water used in the processing the fruit. In many areas fresh manure is used to fertilize vegetables. Fresh manure can contain contaminants which could then effect the vegetable crop.

Other items of concern are unpasteurized fruit juice and boiler chickens. The carcass of any one chicken is exposed to the drippings of hundreds or thousands of other chickens when they all pass through a cold water washing tank after they are slaughtered. Any food which comes from a group of animals or sources presents a higher risk of contamination, slight as it may be.