Salmonella

Salmonella is a genus of Gram negative bacteria that are found worldwide in exotherms (cold-blooded organisms) and endotherms (warm-blooded organisms) and non-living habitats.

Certain Salmonella strains can cause severe food poisoning, but most infections are mild. They cause diarrhoea which usually stops on its own without any treatment. People most at risk are the young, the elderly and people with weakened immune systems.

Although Salmonella does not make spores to improve its survival rates, it is usually able to survive for weeks, even years, outside the body. That makes it a lot harder to eliminate Salmonella from food. To make things worse, it is not destroyed by freezing.

In order to protect against Salmonella infections, it is usually advised to heat food for at least 10 mins at an internal temperature of 75°C.

The ability to survive outside the body can also lead to food contamination, possibly leading to food poisoning. Because these contaminations are often highly localised, they are not always detected during routine food testing. If the possibility of a contamination is suspected later on, a food recall is initiated. Although very costly, these food recalls can sometimes save lives.

The negative result of these recalls is that the public often gets the impression that food quality is going down, whereas the opposite is true. Food poisonings are becoming so rare that they are now newsworthy. Just a few decades ago, food poisonings were so common that they were hardly ever mentioned in the media.

Needless to say that scaremongers, conspiracy theorists and similar paralogicals enjoy these recalls to no end, exploiting them to the fullest and claiming that these only occur because “big business” and the government are conspiring to kill the poor public.

Salmonella is zoonotic, that means that it can jump species between humans and other animals. The faeces of gulls, rock doves and turtles are well-known source of Salmonella.