Salmonella and your food

By Rechell McDonald
Do you know where salmonella comes from, or how it gets on your foods? The answers are actually rather yucky, to say it politely.
Salmonella is a bacteria that lives inside the intestines of animals, including people, and often ends up contaminating food via fecal matter. This may seem odd, and you may be wondering how feces find their way onto your chicken breast, but the truth is it’s a problem with all raw meats and seafood. Introduction of fecal matter to meat products, when it happens, is usually at some point during the butchering process. For seafood, contamination can happen when the seafood is harvested from contaminated water.
Other contaminated foods that may be in your kitchen are eggs, as well as fruits and vegetables. For eggs, salmonella can find its way inside an egg during the formation process before a shell is present and, afterward, salmonella could be present on a shell and contaminate the egg itself during the cracking process. Raw eggs are used in mayonnaise, hollandaise sauce, and consumed raw as a drink. Consuming eggs through these means is considered risky for infection.
Vegetables and fruits can carry it if they are cleaned with contaminated water or come into contact with a raw meat product. Above all else, people often forget that they, too, carry and produce salmonella within their own bodies. Failing to wash your hands after using the toilet or changing a diaper can result in infecting yourself and contaminating your food. Other covert means of infection can occur by handling amphibians like snakes, and then touching your face or mouth without washing your hands.
You are at an increased risk of being infected by salmonella if you have recently completed a course of antibiotics or are currently on them; if you regularly consume antacids; or if you have a bowel/digestive disorder like irritable bowel syndrome. Symptoms of salmonella infection (a.k.a. food poisoning) include chills, diarrhea, vomiting, cramping, and headaches. It can take as little as a few hours or as much as two days for symptoms to appear after being infected, and depending on the strength of the strain of salmonella, it can take a few days or up to a week for your symptoms to subside.
As always, health agencies implore you to wash your hands diligently and to avoid cross-contamination by cooking raw meats to their prescribed internal temperatures, and by avoiding mixing raw and cooked foods, particularly with respect to your cooking surfaces (counters and cutting boards).