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This story was written and originally published by Reveal, a new public radio show and podcast from The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. Learn more at revealnews.org. This looks like a humble black work boot with a filthy white sock over it. But it actually is a secret weapon in the fight against salmonella, a microscopic bacteria that can make people sick. It’s one of many things farmers in Denmark have started doing since surging human illnesses prompted the country to no longer tolerate the bacteria in its chicken. It’s pretty simple: Danish farmers wear the socks over their boots when they’re in chicken houses to gather samples of the bacteria in the chickens’ poop. If those socks test positive for salmonella, all the birds in that house are declared contaminated. The house must be thoroughly cleaned out after the chickens are killed. The meat can be offered to customers only if it is cooked before being sold. The United States is far more tolerant of salmonella. There’s no mandate to control it on the farms or hatcheries that raise chickens for slaughter. Limited testing is required only at the final step: the slaughterhouse. By that time, chickens already can be carrying the bacteria in their guts, its natural habitat. Or it can be on their feathers, feet or skin from their feces. It can spread from carcass to carcass during processing. While processors try to clean the bacteria off the skin and meat with chemicals, some often escapes removal. That means that if you want to eat chicken in the U.S., salmonella is a risk you have to live with. It’s one that’s getting more prominent, too. Americans are eating more chicken than ever as they move away from red meat. Antibiotic-resistant strains of the bacteria can make it harder to combat. And it can be fatal. After a 2013 outbreak linked to Foster Farms in California, Reveal and a number of other media organizations—including The New Yorker, The Oregonian and FRONTLINE—have uncovered holes in our food safety system that allow people to get sick from our most popular meat. Here’s a list of what you should know before you eat your next chicken dinner. 1. It’s legal to sell raw chicken that has bacteria on it that could kill you. In the U.S., it’s simply accepted that salmonella may be on the raw chicken we buy in the grocery store. In fact, about 25 percent of raw chicken pieces like breasts and legs are contaminated with the stuff, according to federal data. Not all strains of salmonella make people sick. Cooking the raw meat can kill the bacteria that is dangerous, but you still can get sick if you don’t handle it exactly right. There’s a chance of contaminating the cutting board, the knife, the kitchen counter and the sink. Here’s official guidance on how to deal with your chicken before it is your dinner. If you do get sick, it can be a lot worse than a few days with an upset stomach. Salmonella can cause diarrhea so bad that it can lead to hospitalization. When illness is severe, infection can spread from the intestines into the bloodstream and to other places in the body. The illness can be truly gruesome. Without treatment with antibiotics, people can die. Rick Schiller’s infected leg swelled to twice its normal size, thanks to salmonella from Foster Farms chicken. His purple limb was filled with a “chunky, meatlike substance” that a doctor drained with a syringe. Noah Craten, an 18-month-old, had a persistent fever for nearly a month. Doctors eventually found abscesses on his brain, which they linked to a salmonella infection in his bloodstream. 2. Salmonella is the rare foodborne pathogen that is both common and potentially deadly. Every year, about 48 million people in the U.S. get sick from foodborne illnesses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But not all pathogens are created equal. The New Yorker puts this well: Salmonella sickens about 1 million Americans a year, and about 380 of them die, according to the CDC. No other foodborne pathogen causes more hospitalizations or deaths than salmonella. About 200,000 of those illnesses come from poultry every year. Chicken is a common source for salmonella infection in people. 3. Even when processing plants meet federal standards, they can be the source of massive outbreaks. When the Foster Farms outbreak occurred, the processing plants in question were easily meeting the federal salmonella standard, which allows 7.5 percent of whole chickens tested to be contaminated. But that standard applies only to whole carcasses—not the cut-up pieces, such as breasts, wings and thighs that most shoppers buy. When birds are cut up, salmonella may be released from the skin. And birds can contaminate each other while they’re being cut up and when the pieces are mixed together. That helps explain why a processing plant could be meeting current federal regulations but still making lots of people sick. The standard also does not distinguish between strains of salmonella that are harmless to humans and those that are the most dangerous. Currently, the government has standards for whole carcasses and ground chicken, not individual parts sold at supermarkets. New rules are in the works that would change this, but they likely won’t be finalized until early next year. Plus, the proposed standard would represent only an improvement over the current level of contamination of chicken parts —about 25 percent—by still allowing 15.4 percent of them to carry the bacteria. 4. There’s no requirement to test chickens for salmonella where it spreads—on the farm. The only regulation of salmonella in our chicken meat occurs at the slaughterhouse. But healthy birds can acquire and spread the bacteria to each other long before that. Most strains don’t make them sick; the chickens are just carriers. “We have such a convoluted food safety system in the United States,” saidGreg Gunthorp, who has a very small processing plant on his farm in Indiana where he slaughters chickens. He describes an imaginary line around his processing plant. Inside it, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has “ultimate jurisdiction,” but out on the pasture where the birds grow, “they couldn’t come out here if they wanted to,” he said.
