Oh the decisions this week! The July issue of Lancet Infectious Diseases reports that you can get MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staph aureus) from man’s best friend. Accarding to the article, dog slobber hosts an array of pathogens, and dog-bites are an increasingly being found as a cause of MRSA infections, especially in children. Here is a news article on the topic; you can also access the journal article through the UNC Electronic Health Science Library. Dogs (and cats too!) can be carriers of the bacteria… and their most likely source of acquiring it in the first place? Their owners. What goes around comes around.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the cookie dough recall. Contaminated spinach or peanuts is one thing, but don’t mess with the cookie dough. Nestle cookie dough has been implicated after a months-long search for the culprit of E. coli O157:H7 infections, occurring mainly in young women. There’s a nice summary of the problem in this NY Times article. Exactly how the cookie dough was contaminated hasn’t yet been determined. Personally, I prefer to get my foodborne illness from homemade cookie dough, it is much preferred over store-bought illness. (This photo is one I took of my most recent batch!).
But this week’s winner is tapeworm. Now I do consider myself an adventurous eater, and I have willingly eaten specialties from a wide variety of cultures, including insects and several dishes where I decided I was better off not knowing what I was eating. But I do draw the line at raw fish, even though I feel chagrined every time I see a 5-year-old happily eating sushi while I resign myself to a noodle dish. But last week ABC news made me feel a lot better, when they published an extremely scientifically rigorous article about the the increase in parasites from raw fish, especially salmon tapeworm. So this week’s disease of the week: Tapeworm infection!
Are there any foods these days that can be eaten 100% safely in their raw form?!?!