Posted on 12/10/2011 12:31:43 PM PST by nuconvert
-excerpt-
... the culprit of a 2009 multi-state E. coli outbreak was none other than the ready-to-bake prepackaged cookie dough found in most grocery stores. At the time of the outbreak, 77 people from 30 states became ill from the bad batter. About half of those people got so sick they had to be hospitalized.
After a thorough investigation, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control still have yet to fully pinpoint the ingredient in the cookie dough that caused the outbreak, but CDC study author Dr. Karen Neil said researchers believe the problem was in the flour. Raw flour does not go through the same rigorous process to kill pathogens the way in which eggs, molasses and sugar do in commercial products
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
lol. good idea
Maybe cookie dough needs to be irradiated to kill the E Coli since some people insist on eating it raw.Idiots.
I can mine raw because it’s made from eggs from my chickens who have been tested by the state.
I guess you could take your fate into your own hands and make your own cookie dough?
A non-answer.
E. coli is an organism found only in the intestines of mammals. And the strains that make people sick are pretty much limited to herbivores such as cattle and deer.
So how did the bacteria get into the flour? It certainly wasn't living in the wheat.
Vermin at the mill?Animal waste in the harvesting or storage stages?
I believe E Coli is also found in human excrement. When it has been linked to vegetables (as it has over the past few years), it was discovered a couple of times that the cause was due to the farmhands urinating and defecating right in the fields they were harvesting.
I’m not saying that’s how it got in the flour. But it could have gotten there if a patch of the wheat field was an area frequented by wildlife for urinating/defecating. It gets on the wheat. They harvest and process it. It is not irradiated or cooked, and the E Coli is alive in the flour.
The article doesn’t specify the strain of E. coli involved.
E. coli lives in everyone’s guts. It is also a common little laboratory “workhorse” (in that scientists use it for all kinds of experiments).
As I said, E. coli is found in mammalian excrement. (Actually all warm-blooded animals.) Humans are mammals and all of us carry E. coli. In fact, it is essential to human life. Produces vitamins for us, and many of the presently popular probiotic treatments involve consumption of E. coli.
The particular strains that cause serious human disease are more likely to be carried by herbivores than by other humans.
The fact that contamination by feces of water sources is usually measured by the E. coli concentration misleads a lot of people into thinking it’s the E. coli that is particularly dangerous. In actual fact, it’s just easy to measure and provides an excellent tracer organism. There are lots of other bacteria in human feces that are more likely to cause serious illness in people.
BTW, E. coli is such an extremely diverse species that it should probably have many of its “strains” reclassified as separate species.
Sounds like somebody needs to come out with a cookie dough and advertise that it’s safe to eat raw! I love raw cookie dough and think it’s much tastier than the cooked cookies. I love cake batter, too, and since there’s now cookie dough and cake batter flavored ice cream, it appears I’m not the only one.
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