A half-billion or so eggs were speedily pulled off semi-cooled supermarket shelves this week. The concern is that bacteria-laced eggs can cause serious and even deadly illness. The companies that produced and disseminated those marked eggs fear more lawsuits. Some people who usually enjoy their eggs in the morning, sunny-side up, are thinking twice.
The greatest egg recall ever set off alarms on CNN (Paging Dr. Gupta), on the front page of my newspaper’s business section, on some health blogs and in some homes. I’m concerned and saddened by this, about the cost of all this — the frank wastefulness of it. Our food supply is not infinite.
But I’m not particularly worried about getting sick from eating eggs at this time. Rather, I’ve been aware of this potential problem at least since 1984, when I took classes in microbiology. That raw or undercooked, runny eggs can effectively deliver salmonella to the digestive tract is something doctors learn in medical school. (And, maybe, the rest of the population should be taught in what used to be called home economics?)
In my home we don’t eat a lot of eggs, mainly because of my personal aversion and fear of cholesterol-lowering drugs. We go through perhaps a dozen eggs in most months. But when I do cook with eggs, whether that’s in baking a quiche, vegetable soufflé or cake, or rarely, for breakfast in omelet or scrambled form, I cook them thoroughly, applying heat through-and-through, and keep any utensils that have touched raw egg apart from anything else in the sink or on the kitchen counter.
Shifting gears, just a bit — this story reminds me of a gradual change in how we practiced medicine in the years after the start of the AIDS epidemic. In 1983, when I entered medical school, few doctors wore gloves except when they were performing surgery. At Bellevue Hospital in 1985 and 1986, my classmates and I helped to deliver babies with our bare hands.
Gradually, and as fear caught on, some doctors started to discriminate – they’d wear gloves while drawing blood from a patient with obvious risk factors for HIV, such as a promiscuous homosexual man or an intravenous drug user. But I always thought to myself, you never know who’s got what virus, we should be careful more often.
A few years later, when I was a resident physician and pregnant fellow, the concept of universal precautions came into widespread practice. Doctors and nurses learned – had to be instructed — to don gloves whenever they drew blood or potentially came into contact with any patient’s body fluids because, the idea emerged, anyone might have HIV. Better to be careful in general, without prejudice.
These practices annoyed some at first. For doctors, they cost us time and the value of touch. Among other problems, it became suddenly more difficult to insert an IV catheter in one shot because feeling a patient’s vein is a lot harder when there’s a layer of material between your fingers and the patient’s skin. I suspect, also, that some hospital administrators must have resisted, too, because of all the money needed to buy all those gloves and new-fangled needle-dispenser boxes.
Some food-minded folks and editorialists suggest that risk might be reduced by buying less-travelled eggs from local producers. But regardless of where you live and shop for food, local farmers vary in their practices and habits. As for organic farms, there’s no real evidence that those are cleaner than other agricultural sources. (Some may be, but which? It could go either way.)
This situation bears some analogy to the reason why doctors implemented universal precautions in medicine. Some of us harbor prejudice (and maybe even some anger or resentment…) against efficient, industrial-sized food-growers and may be, accordingly, biased and even lenient in attitudes on standards and regulations for local farmers’ markets. And so the danger is, we may be less careful with eggs from a small-scale farm down the road. Those eggs seem OK, or at least we feel better about their purchase.
My point is, it’s generally better to behave without bias.
I think it would be smart for cooks to use universal precautions when handling eggs. There’s always some risk of contamination by salmonella and other disease-causing bacteria. I cook eggs well, regardless of their source or what’s picked up in today’s news.
I imagine how you must have been feeling watching me eat that soft boiled egg the other day. It was delicious, but I get your point of view.
As someone who caught hep C in the old days before universal precautions, perhaps I should cook my eggs a bit longer…
Peggy