Will New Egg Guidelines Prevent Another Huge Salmonella Outbreak?

Keep your fingers out of that cake batter. Late last week, Wright County Egg in Iowa issued a huge voluntary recall of eggs due to an outbreak of salmonella. After several people in Minnesota got sick in May and June, restaurants in California and Colorado were also identified as carrying infected eggs, kicking off the national recall of more than a dozen egg brands including big names like Lucerne, Albertson's, and Ralph's.

But wait, it gets worse: As of yesterday, the recall has expanded after more than 200 illnesses were reported in California. Investigations are ongoing, but several of the illnesses were traced back to a Wright County Egg distribution center. Now, California's NuCal Foods is adding five more brands to the recall list, bringing the total number of recalled eggs up to 380 million.

This outbreak comes on the heels of the release of a non-binding "draft guidance" on the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) new egg safety rules that recently went into effect. While the new guidelines are voluntary recommendations, the rules they fulfill are mandatory. The guidelines merely reflect the government's current thinking on how farmers can best implement those rules. While it does leave one to wonder about how a producer might manage to follow the letter of the law but not the spirit, generally I am reassured that the guidelines underscore the tough safety rules that producers with more than 3,000 hens are now required to follow.

And these rules don't come a minute too soon. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report a four-fold increase in the weekly number of Salmonella enteritidis infections throughout June and July. It seems ironic that the worst Salmonella outbreak in recent memory happened just before the FDA's new safety rules went into effect on July 9th. I wonder how things would have been different had those rules been implemented a few months earlier.

Hopefully moving forward we will see a marked improvement in the egg safety record, but a healthy egg model doesn't need biosecurity measures and cage disinfectants like those outlined under the new FDA guidelines. This whole salmonella situation underscores the vast superiority of buying pastured eggs from a farmer you trust, or raising them in your own backyard.

Photo credit: aussiegall via Flickr