There's a 25% chance your supermarket ground beef contains antibiotic-resistant fatal bacteria

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Mark Bittman has yet another fascinating column in the New York Times, this time on the prevalence of bacteria in meat. He discusses a study that analyzed 80 brands of beef, pork chicken and turkey from five cities. The study found that 47% of the meat contained the bacteria staphylococcus aureus and that 52% were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics. One particular line struck us:

So when you go to the supermarket to buy one of these brands of pre-ground meat products, there's a roughly 25 percent chance you'll consume a potentially fatal bacteria that doesn't respond to commonly prescribed drugs.

Yup, you read that right folks -- based on this study, there is about a one-in-four chance that your ground meat contains a potentially fatal bacteria. Now why is that the case? That's when things get tricky. There has always been problems with giving antibiotics to healthy farm animals, but the practice is widespread nonetheless. In short, antibiotic use on farms can be linked to rising rates of drug-resistant infections.

Now it turns out that the FDA recently decided not to fight against this antibiotic use. So that means that, for the time being, if you use pre-packaged ground beef to make a hamburger, it's probably best to cook the meat through rather than keeping it tastily rare. (Even antibiotic resistant bacteria can be killed by sufficient heat.) Or better yet, grind high-quality meat yourself, or have a reputable butcher grind it right in front of your eyes.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/28/ground-meat-fatal-bacteria_n_1173246.html

[bitchkitty]

1. Staph burgers, yummy! n/t

[nobodyspecial]

2. Best to stop eating meat

Maybe if you know the farmer who raised it or hunted it yourself.

[sylveste]

3. or at least

cook it.

[tammywammy]

4. So, if I'm cooking beef, what is the best temp to cook to?

Is medium rare okay or should I cook everything medium well? At what temp is all the bacteria killed?

edited to add: Though I'd like the advice from the above question. I reread and see this is about ground beef which I always cook "well done",

[kenny blankenship]

10. If you didn't grind it yourself, cook it gray all the way through

that is the only way to be safe and sure. But it's not going to be the way to carnivore happiness.
You can grind it yourself, though, and have medium rare, juicy burgers, and still stay safe.

It's like this: the germs that cause severe food poisoning that can kill (such as virulent strains of E. Coli) come from inside the animal's intestinal tract. They don't live inside the animal's flesh. So if they somehow get on a steak, they are on the outside, not the inside, and do not spread if the meat is properly refrigerated. However when beef is ground at a processing plant, one speck of splashed-on cow crap landing on the outside of a chuck roast can infect the entire processing path and contaminate hundreds of thousands of pounds of hamburger product with potentially lethal bacteria before it is caught. Meanwhile people can be happily eating ribeyes and t-bones from the same cows at medium rare without any fears. That's because the cuts of meat that are marketed and cooked as steak will be thoroughly cooked on the outside, even though they are left pink or red inside, killing the germs on the surface where they occur. But since in ground beef products the outside has been all mixed up with the inside during processing, cooking the outside to well done is not enough, because the germs have been distributed inside and won't be killed if the meat is still below 165F at the center. This didn't used to be a big problem, but in recent decades bacteria have both risen to the challenge of antibiotics in the animals' feed and taken advantage of the unprecedented opportunity presented by the unsanitary conditions of massive factory feed lots. They have evolved in response to the environmental stimuli we've created for them. So now we have "killer" strains of E. Coli etc. which make eating hamburgers, as we knew them in our youth, into a game of Russian roulette.

The solution is to buy beef as whole cuts. like chuck roast and short ribs, dip it in boiling water for 10 seconds, which is enough to gray the outside, then cube it up and grind it. You can find lots of information on how this is done either with a food processor or a hand grinder on the internet. Following basic sanitary precautions, this will make ground beef as safe as any steak you would order medium rare at a nice steak house. And probably by grinding your own, you will also be making the best hamburgers you've ever tasted at the same time.

[tammywammy]

16. That's a great post

[kenny blankenship]

21. Thank you. It's my pleasure to share this information-

As I had been self-exiled from eating hamburgers out of fear of E. coli O157:H7 poisoning for about 15 YEARS before I found about grinding beef at home. That's way too long to live without a hamburger, and if I can spare anyone else that kind of deprivation I am happy do it.

We always have to keep an eye on the news however, because the germs keep evolving. This past year's E. coli O104:H4 outbreak in Europe was the worst ever seen, in terms of the virulence of the new strain. The 18 people who died experienced the kinds of nightmarish symptoms one associates more with plagues like the Ebola virus than "food poisoning". And the vector of the poisoning - which was uncooked vegetables, apparently- is as insidious as the effects were horrible. People can say what they like about red meat, but I never thought I'd live to see the day when eating a green salad could kill you. Fortunately this new strain is no more resistant to heat than its predecessors.

[UnrepentantLiberal]

25. A very good post.

Definitely food for thought.

[laundry_queen]

70. Excellent information. Thank you.

Eventually I'd like to grind my own. When I was married, we'd buy a cow at auction and then process it at the local butcher's. I felt it was safter than the store ground beef. Now I'm on my own, I can't afford a whole cow at once and I'm eating the supermarket stuff (and I DO cook the shit out of it, wash everything with hot soapy water constantly, wash my hands in between touching everything so if I make burgers, I'm washing my hands maybe 10 times and every time I flip the burgers, I wash the spatula again). I'd like to feel like my ground beef is somewhat safe again. Maybe I'll go looking for a hand grinder right now...

[magical thyme]

56. medium rare is not ok

Leave nothing pink and eat it while it's still hot so that any bacteria that may have managed to survive will not have had a chance to replicate. Not so hot as to burn your tongue, of course.

Killing is a combination of temp and time.

[downwardly_mobile]

5. Honestly, so what.

When I buy ground beef at the supermarket, I almost always brown it fully (before draining the fat) and then use it in spaghetti sauce or some other kind of mix. Occasionally in the summer I will make a hamburger or two, but not being a foodie, I don't require all my meat to be consumed next-to-raw. And I didn't get sick.

I remember seeing this Bittman on a TV show a while ago where he was leading Gwynneth "Goop" Paltrow on a foodie tour of Spain -- the unlikeable leading the unbearable.

So sorry that most of us can't afford to be organic locavore snobs on a first-name basis with some hipster gentleman farmer to "source" (dreadful usage) our meats for us. There's a recession on.

[Luminous Animal]

6. Or you could eat a lot less but very good meat.

It would be better for your health and better for the environment and better for the animals.

[downwardly_mobile]

7. I don't know if it would be better for my health --

I find that meat fills more than anything else. If I don't eat enough meat, I end up gorging way too much on carbs and sugars. Not just ground beef of course; I find the best food bargains out there are the 99-cent a pound chickens in the supermarket -- buy a nice big one around 7 or 8 pounds, throw it in the oven at 350 degrees, set it and forget it for two and a half hours, and I end up with dinners for almost a week.

[Zalatix]

8. What about ground turkey?

[Luminous Animal]

13. I lost 30lbs this summer from ground turkey food poisoning.

It took me 2 months to gain most of my strength and some of my appetite back - though I am having trouble gaining weight and I look somewhat skeletal.

[Tsiyu]

17. I am sorry to hear that

I use ground turkey - I prefer it in pasta sauces and chili - but I've been really extra careful to cook it thoroughly since I heard about the contamination of a lot of it.

If you can get some cannabis, it might help your appetite

Hope you are feeling much better now and thanks for your insight in this thread.

[Luminous Animal]

26. Oddly enough, I rarely eat meat. It was actually a whim!

And my husband was surprised that I ordered the turkey burger instead of the veggie burger!

And thank you for the advice and the kind thoughts!

I am feeling better but I can't get out of my mind how painful eating became. Every time I'd eat, my temperature would spike, I'd have knife-stabbing pain, and I would end up in a fetal position shivering. I was down to eating about a half a cup of food a day. For the long term, I've most likely permanent kidney damage.

[Tsiyu]

68. Did you sue the restaurant? Holy moley

And what was it - the horrible e coli? It's lucky it didn't kill you. Man that bites (no pun intended) to have that reaction whenever you eat. It hurts my heart to think about the suffering you went through. I'm glad you are on the upswing, but I'd be scared to death to eat anything else myself if I went through all that!

I hope the restaurant is paying your medical bills.

[muriel_volestrangler]

41. It's the worst of the lot - see figures in reply #40

More dangerous than ground beef; but people are less likely to want their turkey 'rare'.

[frazzled]

9. What do they mean by "brands" or "pre-ground meat products"?

The link in the article to the LA Times article about the study (god, how I hate that Huffington Post doesn't acknowledge where it steals its material from; this isn't journalism; it's posts like we all make on DU, but with pictures, ads, and without the upfront attributions) ... says "Researchers from the Translational Genomics Research Institute, a nonprofit biomedical research center in Phoenix, analyzed 136 samples of beef, chicken, pork and turkey from 80 brands."

Do they mean, like, Tyson Hamburger Patties or something, that come pre-made? Or do they mean meat by the pound from the butcher's case at a supermarket? Or both?

I don't buy any kind of meat at a regular supermarket (though I will buy it at Whole Foods), and I would never purchase something like pre-made hamburger patties. At least twenty years ago there were lots of stories about supermarkets not cleaning their grinding machines properly, so I just don't go near the stuff. Why I trust WF to do any better, I don't know: maybe it's because their butchers are always out front and the ground beef is not prepackaged in plastic: you ask for the amount you want and they wrap it in paper. Once or twice I've asked them to grind the beef fresh, because it's near the end of the bin. They're always happy to do it.

At any rate, I'm not too alarmed: I haven't noticed 25% of the populace dropping dead from fatal hamburgers.

[Luminous Animal]

14. The Wired article says it is packages of ground meat. The Wired article also has a link to

the study.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/04/food-resistant-staph/

[muriel_volestrangler]

39. No, it says it's not just ground meat

It is "ground beef, chicken breasts and thighs, pork chops and ground pork, and ground turkey". And, from the study,

"S. aureus contamination was most common among turkey samples (77%; 20/26), followed by pork (42%; 11/26), chicken (41%; 19/46), and beef (37%; 14/38)."

[boppers]

11. Food can kill you if you don't know how to prepare it.

News at 11.

[Luminous Animal]

15. Food can kill you when it is produced on factory farms.

Cows cannot digest corn (the bulk of their diet) and eating corn makes them ill and susceptible to disease so the corn feed is laced with antibiotics (and cow fat) which the cows feed on while standing knee deep in cow shit.

[boppers]

18. Food can also kill you when it is produced on Organic, "green", farms.

http://www.science20.com/challenging_nature/organic_farming_practices_cause_200_instances_serious_food_poisoning

In short: Food can kill. I like my cage-free eggs, and my grass-fed beef, and my organic produce, but food, prepared wrong, kills.

"Factory" food may have a higher, or lower, kill ratio, but if you want to live, prepare food properly.

[Luminous Animal]

22. Your source is incorrect. It had nothing to do organic fertilizer.

Last edited Fri Dec 30, 2011, 04:00 AM - Edit history (1)

The FDA and the CDC investigated and concluded thus: the investigators were able to match environmental samples of E.coli O157:H7 from one field to the strain that had caused the outbreak. Potential environmental risk factors for E.coli O157:H7 contamination at or near the field included the presence of wild pigs, the proximity of irrigation wells used to grow produce for ready-to-eat packaging, and surface waterways exposed to feces from cattle and wildlife.
http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/2007/ucm108873.htm



Grass-fed does not mean that the cows are pastured. Current regulations allow beef to be labeled grass-fed even though they are kept confined, fed little else but hay. Such conditions, of course breed and spread pathogens and these kind of grass-feed ranchers rely heavily on hormones and antibiotics to control disease. Cows that are actually pastured on a well-managed ranch (that is, the cows have the freedom to roam and have access to a wide variety of mature but not old clovers and grasses) will rarely get sick and neither will the humans eating the meat... even when raw.

Cage-free eggs is a meaningless designation. Yes, the chickens are not confined to cages and they have more inches to roam but they roam by the thousands in enclosed low sheds. Antibiotics are not only permitted but heavily used. The so-called free-range chickens and their eggs are housed the same way but a small door is open during the day to allow the chickens to go outside if they choose. But, regulations allow chicken farmers to keep that door closed for the 1st five weeks of the chickens lives (they are slaughtered at 7 weeks). As Michael Pollan put it:

"Since the food and water and flock remain inside the shed, and since the little doors remain shut until the birds are at least five weeks old and well settled in their habits, the chickens apparently see no reason to venture out into what must seem to them an unfamiliar and terrifying world. Since the birds are slaughtered at seven weeks, free range turns out to be not so much a lifestyle for these chickens as a two-week vacation option."

[boppers]

35. Please tell me about your danger-free foods.

Also, do you have a newsletter?

[Luminous Animal]

36. There are no danger-free foods but certainly there are methods of farming

and ranching that result in infinitesimally small chances of getting ill from eating the food.

And I'll respond to your insincere remark about a newsletter. No I do not. But I can recommend a remarkable book that not only has a compelling narrative but is chocked full of some of the best information about food and "food" production that you will ever read. It is called, The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

[boppers]

77. The "newsletter" statement is an internet shibboleth.

Just FYI.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

12. No more medium rare burger when I eat out?

[slackmaster]

43. Don't eat out at places that use "supermarket" ground beef for their burgers

Feed your body something better.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

55. I guess my question is how much better can a nicer places beef be?

Only 12.5%?

[slackmaster]

57. Let me put it this way - I have gotten sick from McD's, BK, and JitB but never from places...

...that advertise that they use premium beef, usually called "natural", "organic", "range-fed," etc.

In-N-Out has always fared well in my GI tract.

When I buy ground beef for home-cooked hamburgers, which is rare, (or beef tartare which is even rarer) I usually get it at Iowa Meat Farms or another gourmet type place.

http://www.iowameatfarms.com/

If I want to make a batch of something that gets cooked thoroughly, such as meatballs, I usually get it from Costco.

[BeHereNow]

19. I would no more eat a cow, pig or chicken- than one of my cats, horses or dog.

It ain't natural- cannibalism.
Act against nature and you reap what you sow.
Corporate farming is not natural.

BHN

[Odin2005]

47. Humans are omnivores, eating meat is natural.

[BeHereNow]

58. But the meat on the market is FAR from natural...

and that the problem with eating it, for me anyway.
Not that I haven't eaten meat in my life- but only
if it comes from being raised eating naturally.
You are what you eat and all that-
So what the animal eats becomes part of you.
I wont drink milk either...
BHN

[JDPriestly]

20. Who buys supermarket ground beef these days????

Nobody who is health-conscious.

[Luminous Animal]

23. The vast majority.

[TwilightGardener]

48. Really? Who DOESN'T, if you have a family to feed and don't have the bucks

or time to do otherwise?

[Warren DeMontague]

24. cook the crap out of raw meat

esp. the ground variety.

[Luminous Animal]

28. That's what it comes down to when the vast majority of meat available

is produced under the most horrific and unhealthful conditions.

But, true to form, we don't demand solutions, we allow corporations to put big giant band-aids on the scabs and then sell those scabs to the public and, in turn our government advises us to eat those scabs but only if we've sufficiently processed them at home by turning them into shoe leather.

[Warren DeMontague]

31. actually, I don't buy ground beef, only free range humanely raised poultry

when family members eat steak it is locally produced and again, as ethically sourced as possible.


Still, it's a good idea to cook the crap out of raw meat.

[Luminous Animal]

33. Yes. The vast majority of meat eaters have to cook all the flavor

and tenderness out of meat in order to eat it safely because our safety standards are so low. For the 1% who have access to and can afford properly raised livestock, your advice runs afoul of science and is meaningless.

[Warren DeMontague]

34. Jesus fucking Christ. I'm only trying to help.

Pick a fight with the fucking FDA, not me.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

60. LOL

[tabbycat31]

53. that is wonderful you can afford free range poultry

Must be nice to have a food budget that allows it. On $30 a week that is impossible unless I don't eat anything else.

[Zalatix]

59. Let's see, which is worse, more expensive food or a major bacteria infection outbreak?

I think free range should be the law. Or, at least, a ban on antibiotics use.

[Warren DeMontague]

69. Trader Joe's.

Anyway, if you really, really, really want to fight with me, come over to the thread hand-wringing over sexy Rolling Stone covers. Really, I'm just not up for meat this week.

[Warren DeMontague]

74. There are also ways to make, for instance, a single chicken breast go a long way

the other night we did some cubed chicken up with frozen okra (cheap) and garbanzo beans (something like 45 cents a can, at Costco)

I'm not denying that humanely produced meat and organic food is more expensive, and if I had my way our food safety apparatus would be MUCH more involved and effective-- but even in the current reality there are things people can do, and eating less meat in general is usually a good move health-wise.

[Marrah_G]

64. I would love to see huge agro companies put out of business

I would love to see farmers markets in every town. I think it will be a while before that happens. I do see attitudes around here in New England changing, or at least they seem to be.

I do the only thing I can do and that is to share ways that I have found to make positive changes on a tight budget with my friends and family.

[thelordofhell]

27. So that explains the 1 in 4 dead people at the meat counter

Seriously folks, cooking the meat kills the bacteria.........even the "killer" kinds

[Luminous Animal]

29. It is amazing how easily we've accepted that killer bacteria is a natural

part of the "food" chain and the responsibility of delivering healthy food to our tables lies not with the producer but with the consumer.

[jeff47]

46. Because killer bacteria has always been part of the food chain

Why do you think we developed preservation techniques like smoking and drying? The meat was all "organic" at the time, since we hadn't developed any other way to raise livestock.

Btw, eating staph isn't going to kill you. So calling it "killer" is a tad over-the-top. Staph infections can kill, but those aren't caused by ingesting it.

[Marrah_G]

65. It is part of the food chain

We can try to minimize it as much as possible but it will always be out there.

[SOS]

51. 1 in 4 do get sick

76 million food poisonings a year with 5,000 officially dead.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/top-10-food-poisoning-risks/

Deaths are likely 10,000 in reality, due to underreporting:

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2003/02/17/785664.htm

Cooking ground meat is good advice, but for the 10,000 dead
it wasn't enough.

[workinclasszero]

30. Another great reason to be a vegetarian :) /nt

[Sherman A1]

32. Yes, because is too is so very safe.....

2nd person sues Schnucks over E. coli outbreak


A man from St. Louis County is the second person to seek damages from Schnucks after falling ill during an E. coli outbreak linked to lettuce sold at local stores, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in circuit court.
In mid-October, Charles Meyer, 61, ate romaine lettuce and other salad bar items several times from the Schnucks in Cool Valley. Meyer later developed an E. coli bacterial infection and was treated at Mercy Hospital in Creve Coeur, where he stayed in the cardiac unit for several days.


Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/nd-person-sues-schnucks-over-e-coli-outbreak/article_fc736fef-32c2-5e44-91dd-9d82e7d15991.html#ixzz1i0R4rTqo

[Trillo]

54. I'm glad someone pointed out one of the important, if peripheral,

issues to growing antibiotic resistant bacteria in livestock's intestines: resistant bacteria don't stay in their intestines.

[TwilightGardener]

49. Except for the killer cantaloupes.

[DCKit]

37. Oh geez, thanks so much for that. Bastid. nt

[PotatoChip]

38. Just a couple of weeks ago, I ate some burgers from a batch recalled for Salmonella

I had literally just finished eating when I heard on my local news that some ground meat of the very same brand I used had been recalled. So I pulled the package from the garbage and yes, it was from that very same batch. I was horrified.

Thankfully my partner and I both like ours very well done and I'm always careful about meat hygiene. Nonetheless, it took over a week of our not getting sick before I was sure we were going to be ok.

It's disturbing that the FDA seems to be losening requirements. I realize that the bacteria they are talking about in this article is probably not Salmonella (didn't check the link) but still-

[muriel_volestrangler]

40. Beef had the lowest contanimation in the test

Huffington Post incorrectly makes this just about ground meat; and the thread title has made that worse, by claiming this is just about ground beef. It's not; from the actual paper:

Retail beef (ground), chicken (breasts, thighs), pork (chops, ground), and turkey (ground, cutlets) products were collected from 26 retail grocery stores in 5 US cities: Chicago; Washington, DC; Fort Lauderdale; Los Angeles; and Flagstaff.
...
We collected and tested a total of 136 meat and poultry samples from 5 US cities, encompassing 80 unique brands from 26 grocery stores. S. aureus contamination was most common among turkey samples (77%; 20/26), followed by pork (42%; 11/26), chicken (41%; 19/46), and beef (37%; 14/38). A subset of meat and poultry samples (10%; 14/136) was contaminated by multiple unique S. aureus strains as determined by MLST and susceptibility profiles, and a total of 79 unique isolates were used in subsequent analyses.
...
Multidrug resistance, defined as intermediate or complete resistance to 3 or more antimicrobial classes, was common among the S. aureus isolates (52%) and most prevalent among S. aureus isolates from turkey (79%; 22/28), followed by those from pork (64%; 7/11), beef (35%; 6/17), and chicken (26%; 6/23).

http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/04/14/cid.cir181.full

So the ground beef multiple resistance figure is actually 35% of 37%, or 13%. Compare that with the turkey figure - 79% of 77%, or 61%. Mind you, beef is the meat that more people like to have rare, so it probably is the one people need to be reminded the most about cooking.

[derby378]

42. Do what we Texans always do...

Cook the heck outta that meat. Bacteria might be able to resist antibiotics, but they can't resist fire.

[Marrah_G]

44. Yet another reason to support organic farmers of grass raised beef

Buy in bulk and split it with a couple of families if you can afford it.

Buy local and organic, direct from the farms if you have the option. It is a win / win !

If you can't afford to do that then my suggestion is to pay the higher price for the better beef and cut the portions in half.

I also do that with milk. We only buy organic dairy now and I make sure that we use less of it.

root type veggies can bulk out a mean nicely.

[frazzled]

50. Organic grass-fed beef is just as susceptible to E-coli bacteria

The comparative health benefits of grass-fed beef are well documented. Scores of studies indicate that it's higher in omega 3s and lower in saturated fat. But when it comes to E. coli O157:H7, the advantages of grass-fed beef are not so clear. In fact, exploring the connection between grass-fed beef and these dangerous bacteria offers a disturbing lesson in how culinary wisdom becomes foodie dogma and how foodie dogma can turn into a recipe for disaster.
Could grass-fed beef ever be afflicted with the sort of E. coli O157:H7 outbreak that led to the December recall? Not according to the conventional wisdom among culinary tastemakers. This idea rose to the top of the journalistic food chain in the fall of 2006, when food activist Nina Planck wrote about the bacteria strain on the op-ed page of the New York Times. ...

Unfortunately, the scientific evidence tells a very different story. Planck's assertion seems to be based on a 1998 report published in the journal Science. In this study, the authors fed three cows a variety of diets in order to ascertain how feed type influenced intestinal acidity in cows and, in turn, how intestinal acidity influenced the concentration of acid-resistant strains of E. coli. They hypothesized that these strains would be especially dangerous to humans, since they could survive the low-pH environment of the human stomach. It turned out that grain-fed cattle did indeed have a much more acidic stomach than those fed grass or hay. And sure enough, they had a million times more acid-resistant E. coli in their colons. ...

But between 2000 and 2006, scientists began to take a closer look at the effect of diet on E. coli O157:H7 specifically. A different set of findings emerged to indicate that this particular strain did not, in fact, behave like other strains of E. coli found in cattle guts. Most importantly (in terms of consumer safety), scientists showed in a half-dozen studies that grass-fed cows do become colonized with E. coli O157:H7 at rates nearly the same as grain-fed cattle. An Australian study actually found a higher prevalence of O157:H7 in the feces of grass-fed rather than grain-fed cows. The effect postulated (and widely publicized) in the 1998 Science report—that grain-fed, acidic intestines induced the colonization of acid-resistant E. coli—did not apply to the very strain of bacteria that was triggering all the recalls.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/green_room/2010/01/beware_the_myth_of_grassfed_beef.html

And, indeed, there have been a number of recalls of organic grass-fed beef (google it). Same with vegetables ... organic spinach can be bad, too.

[Marrah_G]

62. If you deal directly with small farmers I think its safer

Of course there is always going to be a chance that food will make you sick- but one way to lessen the chances is to attempt to get to know the sources of your food.

There is no perfect way, but every little step we take to try and improve things is a step in a positive direction.

[Odin2005]

45. this is why one should NEVER eat ground beef that is not well done.

[Weisbergkevin]

52. BS article

If there's a 25% chance of the meat I eat having a "fatal" bacteria," then either the bacteria is not "fatal" or the 25% number is wrong, because I should have been dead by now. A person eating supermarket meat hundreds of times off supermarkets should have been dead by now, and that person is me, yet I'm alive as I type this.

Do the math.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

61. We've been meaning to tell you something, umm, did you watch Lost? Well DU is.....ahh you'll figure

....it out on your own

[librechik]

63. I knew it! n/t

[totodeinhere]

66. That's what I thought too. I love hamburger and eat it all the time. And I get mine

from the local supermarket. Yet I am still alive and typing this message. I don't even have a belly ache. Go figure.

[laundry_queen]

71. Really? That's your reasoning?

Are you unable to understand that cooking kills the bacteria? What they are saying is 25% of RAW meat contains that bacteria. If you cook it WELL, you'll be okay because cooking kills the bacteria (if you make sure you don't cross contaminate while you are preparing it). What if you go to a restaurant that isn't quite so careful that one time?

LOTS of people die every year from food poisoning and many more get sick. Just because it hasn't happened to you YET doesn't mean that the bacteria doesn't exist in the meat. It means you've either been very careful with cooking and cleanliness and not eating out very often OR you've just been lucky.

[totodeinhere]

73. The only representation I made was that I eat a lot of hamburger and never get sick.

And that's the truth. I didn't speculate as to why that is and that wasn't my point. If anyone doesn't consider what I said useful information then that's fine with me. But people at DU leave anecdotes all the time and that's all I was doing.

[RebelOne]

67. Never buy the stuff. Fortunately, I am a vegetarian. n/t

[laundry_queen]

72. On the CBC last year they did a story

about anti-biotic resistant bacteria on poultry.

Here's the link but not sure those in the US will be able to see it: http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/2011/superbugsinthesupermarket/

The results were disgusting. If I remember correctly, even the organic stuff was severely contaminated.

[Rex]

75. That is why i ask for burnt

carbon.

[The Genealogist]

76. I cook the hell out of all the meat I eat

Be it steaks, pork, chicken or turkey. I was taught from a young age that pork, chicken, turkey and ground beef needs to be cooked THOROUGHLY. It is hard for me to imagine people eating ground beef undercooked. To me, that's crazy!