Statistics on the news

[661-Pete]

How much of the current problems with our immune systems are due to good hygiene and how much due to lack of activity?

Good question - but respect to you XAPBob for managing to handle your condition as well as you do! I would probably go under faced with similar circumstances.

[[XAP]Bob]

How much of the current problems with our immune systems are due to good hygiene and how much due to lack of activity?

Good question - but respect to you XAPBob for managing to handle your condition as well as you do! I would probably go under faced with similar circumstances.

To an extent you just have to handle it, but thank you

[Penfolds11]

I didn't see the BBC News item, I saw the C4 News item instead. Fundamentally, campylobacter is naturally present in some chickens and is killed when the chicken is thoroughly cooked.

This isn't any normal 24-hour poisoning: it usually lasts for between one and two weeks. However, in more extreme cases it can lead to Guillain-Barré Syndrome which can cause paralysis, and there are an annual average of 100 deaths that are caused by campylobacter.

What the FSA study found was that of the 1,995 samples of fresh whole chilled chickens that were tested, 6% of packaging tested positive for the presence of campylobacter. So if you've unwrapped the chicken and then touched something out in your kitchen, no amount of cooking the chicken will remove the campylobacter that is outside the oven. The FSA now advise that the best way to avoid campylobacter is to cook chicken well and wash hands afterwards as this destroys the bug. Washing the chicken itself is not recommended as its been proven to be an effective way of spreading the bug around the kitchen.

More details here: https://www.food.gov.uk/news-updates/news/2014/13251/campylobacter-survey

It would put me off eating supermarket chicken for life!

[Mick F]

It would put me off eating supermarket chicken for life!

Yep.
It's put us off, and we never buy supermarket meat of any description any more.

Our local butcher knows where his meat is from, and it ain't cheap and nasty, and it ain't horsemeat!

[661-Pete]

What the FSA study found was that of the 1,995 samples of fresh whole chilled chickens that were tested, 6% of packaging tested positive for the presence of campylobacter.

It seems, you can't win! You can be an out-and-out vegan, but if you shop at the supermarket, and the person in front of you at the checkout has bought a chicken, then the assistant will have handled the chicken - in its packaging - before handling your purchases. So you're still at risk. In fact, pathogenic bacteria could be transmitted via the conveyor belt.

It would be nice to be able to shop only at the greengrocer's, but greengrocers are few and far between now (we have none in our town, maybe the apostrophe-pedants have scared them off!) And traditional butchers are not a solution to the problem. The meat they sell has still had to go through the abattoir.

What it needs is a complete clean-up of the meat industry, particularly at the abattoir. Although organic vegetable farming, if the farmer makes use of animal manure, also imposes a potential risk, I believe this risk is far less, provided that manuring is done at the correct time in the crop cycle.

[mjr]

I'm lucky. There's a greengrocer in nearby South Lynn. Well it's a butcher that's diversified. Oh. Wait.

[al_yrpal]

Any decent cook has ALWAYS known the danger of raw chicken. Its all a massive storm in a teacup. Its nothing to do with local butchers being better, nothing has changed, just another newspaper/BBC scare story. Always wash your hands every time you handle raw chicken and keep it well away from food that won't be cooked.

I have cooked for our family for the last twenty years and we have never had food poisoning once because I wash my hands several times whilst preparing and cooking any meal. Almost all the poultry we eat, whether its bought fresh or not goes in the freezer before it is cooked. Its not rocket science!

Al

[Mick F]

We've been married 41years, and in the whole of the time - bringing up two children too - there has only been one incidence of food poisoning, and that was with cooked chicken that we hadn't cooked.

As 661-Pete says, you could be a complete vegan and still suffer from compylobacter from chicken.

[AlaninWales]

Any decent cook has ALWAYS known the danger of raw chicken. Its all a massive storm in a teacup. Its nothing to do with local butchers being better, nothing has changed, just another newspaper/BBC scare story. Always wash your hands every time you handle raw chicken and keep it well away from food that won't be cooked.

I have cooked for our family for the last twenty years and we have never had food poisoning once because I wash my hands several times whilst preparing and cooking any meal. Almost all the poultry we eat, whether its bought fresh or not goes in the freezer before it is cooked. Its not rocket science!

Al

This!
Penfolds11: Washing the carcass is not to avoid any specific bacteria, its is done (if necessary) to remove any of a number of things that you don't want to cook with the chicken if it's been incompletely or clumsily gutted (it happens, this is an imperfect world) - from gall bladder residue to spare bits of packaging. Whether checking over a prepared chicken, drawing pheasant, dressing rabbit or gralloching deer, washing out the carcasse is usual (a supermarket chicken will have already been washed but it is still a good idea to check inside - after all, you could be the lucky recipient of some extra offal!).
Of course you wash down the surfaces after getting rid of the packaging! After all, you wash surfaces after preparing any raw food (including salad) and keep uncookable food well away from any raw meat. Anyone following normal food hygiene procedures is under no more threat from this than from any other part of daily life; we are surrounded by bacteria, many of which can cause poisoning in the wrong circumstances. However, we would be very diseased without them and excessive worry over their presence (as encouraged by reporting like this) is counter-productive in health terms.

[Penfolds11]

Any decent cook has ALWAYS known the danger of raw chicken. Its all a massive storm in a teacup. Its nothing to do with local butchers being better, nothing has changed, just another newspaper/BBC scare story.

Not true - its an FSA study that was published this week and has been reported in all the news media, as it should have been, not just the BBC. It might not apply to you but that doesn't make it a scare story, especially when you can die from it or be paralysed.

And yes, many of us of a certain age or knowledge know this but a lot of people don't otherwise there wouldn't be so many cases every year. Plus there is the (mistaken in my opinion) trust of supermarkets that many people have. In my opinion that's a result of not dealing with a butcher and I include in-supermarket butchers within that category. Talk to your butcher and you learn a lot more about cooking than you do by picking up a packed cut of meat without knowing how to cook it.

[Penfolds11]

Penfolds11: Washing the carcass is not to avoid any specific bacteria, its is done (if necessary) to remove any of a number of things that you don't want to cook with the chicken if it's been incompletely or clumsily gutted (it happens, this is an imperfect world) - from gall bladder residue to spare bits of packaging. Whether checking over a prepared chicken, drawing pheasant, dressing rabbit or gralloching deer, washing out the carcasse is usual (a supermarket chicken will have already been washed but it is still a good idea to check inside - after all, you could be the lucky recipient of some extra offal!).
Of course you wash down the surfaces after getting rid of the packaging! After all, you wash surfaces after preparing any raw food (including salad) and keep uncookable food well away from any raw meat. Anyone following normal food hygiene procedures is under no more threat from this than from any other part of daily life; we are surrounded by bacteria, many of which can cause poisoning in the wrong circumstances. However, we would be very diseased without them and excessive worry over their presence (as encouraged by reporting like this) is counter-productive in health terms.

Firstly I was quoting FSA guidelines about not washing chicken, not giving my own opinion.

Secondly, see above/below depending on which way you are looking at this: you, I and many others know all this but a growing percentage of the population don't, otherwise the FSA wouldn't surely not have felt the need to publish a report into the dangers of not preparing chicken properly specifically to protect against potentially fatal campylobacter. A growing number of the general public have never been taught to cook by their parents and consequently aren't aware of the dangers of food poisoning, neither do they buy from a butcher who can advise them of all this. The go for the cheap food in the supermarket and there is a growing feeling that supermarkets cut corners in the production line to keep profits stable while the selling price falls.

Third, if you are so indifferent about the dangers of supermarket chicken being so highly infected with campylobacter how is it that Prof Tim Lang isn't:

"A leading food expert and adviser to successive governments has called for a boycott of supermarket chicken because of “scandalous” levels of contamination after tests revealed that up to eight in 10 show traces of a potentially lethal bug. Professor Tim Lang, who served as an expert adviser to the health and environment departments until 2011 and advised parliament on setting up the Food Standards Agency, said the levels of food poisoning bugs found in official tests on fresh retail chicken were shocking.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/27/dirty-chicken-scandal-campylobacter-eight-out-10-uk-birds-supermarkets-asda

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/27/chicken-contamination-public-should-stop-buying-poultry

Is he also scaremongering?

[AlaninWales]

I had a micro-biology lecturer at university who claimed it was not possible to cook stuffed turkey thoroughly because he had measured the temp. inside the one his wife was cooking and it did not reach boiling in the middle. All he had proved of course was that his wife was no cook.

Had the emphasis in the reporting been "You really need to ensure any meat you buy is properly cooked" (along with advice on how to tell) then it would have been a responsible message. As presented, it was not.
Campylobacter presence is normal in poultry, also in "young cattle, sheep, goats, dogs, rabbits, monkeys, cats, poultry, gulls, black-birds, starlings and sparrows. In certain situations Campylobacter coli can be pathogenic (P e n e r, 1991; A d e s i y u n et al., 1992), when it was isolated from digestive tracts of pigs, poultry and humans. Campylobacter laridis was isolated in people suffering from diarrhoea, but it cannot be described with certainty as a pathogen of humans and animals." (I g o r M. S t o j a n o v, M a j a J. V e l h n e r, D u š a n B. O r l i ã ,Scientific Veterinary Institute, Rumenaåki 'PRESENCE OF CAMPYLOBACTER SPP. IN NATURE'). Contamination should be assumed when cooking any meat.
From the same paper "Bacteria belonging to Campylobacter genus (Campylobacter) are widely spread in nature. They can be found in humans and animals, in their excretes and secretes, in water, soil and mud" - we should remember that vegetables are often grown in and contaminated by soil.

Teaching people to handle food correctly is responsible, making them afraid of buying food from supermarkets is not. So yes, IMO he is scaremongering.

[beardy]

Final results of the survey in question have now been released.

http://www.food.gov.uk/news-updates/new ... s-12months

To put the problem into perspective, I think in the UK it kills about the same number of people as cars kill people on cycles. The supermarkets have been spurred on by the publicity of the previous quarterly results to do nothing detectable to improve the situation.

[AlaninWales]

I say again, this bacterium naturally occurs in a wide range of animals (including humans) and in soil and mud. Eliminating it to any extent from the food supply chain would involve increased use of bacteriocides which is not a good idea generally - in fact we should be reducing the degree to which we rely on antibiotics used in food production if we are not to face a future where they are largely ineffective. The report does at least give some advice to consumers, but this should be the emphasis, rather than giving the idea that food (should) arrive sterile.

Chicken is safe as long as consumers follow good kitchen practice:

Cover and chill raw chicken: Cover raw chicken and store on the bottom shelf of the fridge so juices cannot drip on to other foods and contaminate them with food poisoning bacteria such as campylobacter.
Don’t wash raw chicken: Cooking will kill any bacteria present, including campylobacter, while washing chicken can spread germs by splashing.
Wash hands and used utensils: Thoroughly wash and clean all utensils, chopping boards and surfaces used to prepare raw chicken. Wash hands thoroughly with soap and warm water, after handling raw chicken. This helps stop the spread of campylobacter by avoiding cross contamination.
Cook chicken thoroughly: Make sure chicken is steaming hot all the way through before serving. Cut in to the thickest part of the meat and check that it is steaming hot with no pink meat and that the juices run clear.

My bold emphasis

[beardy]

Cooking will kill any bacteria present, including campylobacter

Which is fine for those of you who eat the chicken. Those of us who eat the salad prepared by the same chef in the same pub are not so well protected by the careful cooking of the chicken.

Campylobacter kills more people than cars kill cyclists. Yet its presence gets less attention than the ineffective cycling helmets even.

I am not and have not really been bothered by such things as campylobacter but it could well be considered as a nice easy low hanging fruit if you wanted some legislation to save lives.