What’s in YOUR turkey?

Now that Halloween has passed the holiday season is almost upon us. Before it’s time to make all your favorite holiday dishes, let’s take a look at some not widely published information.   Each year the CDC takes a look at the amount of fecal matter found in retail meat.  We will focus on three common viruses found in meat: Salmonella, Campylobacter, and E. Coli.

Starting with Salmonella: last year the percent of retail meat samples, which included chicken breasts, ground turkey, ground beef, and pork chops, with the highest positive finding of Salmonella was ground turkey.  Ground turkey came in with 17.8% of turkey sold in stores containing Salmonella.  In March of this year a magazine called MeatingPlace published an article on Salmonella-contaminated meat in Europe.  It was found that only 2% of retail meat in Europe contained Salmonella, and the reason is it is illegal to sell Salmonella positive meat there.  In the article an Alabama poultry science professor, Bilgili, was asked why this policy is not in place in the United States.  His reply was that because so much of the market is Salmonella positive it would simply be too expensive not to sell it.  To quote Dr. Michael Greger, “That would be like a toy company saying they would love to recall all their dangerous toys but because so many are dangerous it would simply cut too much into our profits.”

Some nonthreatening symptoms of Salmonella poisoning include severe headache, vomiting, diarrhea, fever, flu-like symptoms and the list goes on.  This is what you are signing up for in every 1 out of seven packages of ground turkey.

Moving on to Campylobacter: this disease has symptoms which include abdominal cramps, pain, fever, and bloody diarrhea.   The CDC found that chicken breasts were the most contaminated food with 44.4% of the retail market contaminated.

Finally, we come to E. Coli, which is considered an indicator of how much fecal matter is left on retail meat.   The CDC found that the ground turkey was the highest with 93.2% of the meat on the market containing animal feces.  Not only does ground turkey come in over 50% but so do chicken breasts and ground beef at 87.4% and 74.6% respectively.

Yuck.