Almost all people practice washing the raw chicken before cooking it. People usually do this in order to get rid of the bacteria that everyone knows are present in raw chicken and can do us harm. They think that being extra careful is a good thing and we should all be precautious and rinse the chicken off before cooking it.
As the Food Standards Agency has lately stated, washing the chicken can actually cause spreading of these harmful bacteria rather than disinfection of them.
The following information is supposed to provide you with the reasons why washing raw chicken can be dangerous for your health and how can you go on enjoying chicken, avoiding at the same time all those nasty bacteria.
Why you Shouldn’t Wash Raw Chicken
The bacteria that the raw chicken contains can lead do some serious illnesses or even worse. People in North America usually get food poisoning from two different types of bacteria that the raw, uncooked chicken contains – campylobacter and salmonella.
The salmonella bacteria group is often found in the intestines of birds. If one consumes food that is contaminated with salmonella they will experience symptoms like fever, diarrhea, nausea, abdominal cramps, and vomiting. People who get sick from salmonella exposure usually recover after several days, but there are cases in which people further develop more serious illnesses and sometimes even die as a result. One of these illnesses is the septicaemia, also known as blood poisoning.
Campylobacter is one of the major causes of diarrhea illnesses in the USA. The person that gets this disease experiences extreme abdominal pain, and this state can last for up to ten days. The campylobacter exposure can also have some long term effects, including arthritis and a rare illness called Guillan-Barre syndrome. The Guillan-Barre syndrome leads to muscle weakness and it can also impact the nervous system. About 40 percent of the cases of Guillan-Barre syndrome in the USA are due to campylobacter exposure.
The Food Standards Agency informs that the campylobacter cannot be eliminated through the use of water. Actually, washing raw and uncooked chicken that contains this bacterium leads to its spreading through the water particles instead. Thus, if one washes a contaminated piece of chicken, they do not only have to worry about the area that the chicken comes in contact with, but they also need to worry about the area that the water they have used comes in contact with. This can transform the chicken you consume into a minefield of harmful bacteria.
How to Avoid Food Poisoning
The Food Standards Agency recommends that the best way for you to kill off the harmful bacteria in the chicken is to cook it as thoroughly as possible.
Ensure that the chicken you cook is steaming hot all the way through before you serve it or consume it. Then, cut in to the thickest piece of meat and see if this piece is also steaming hot and does not have any pink meat. Also, you need to make sure that the juices of the meat have run clear.
Another thing you should be careful about is to store the chicken at a temperature no higher than four degrees Celsius, because storing the chicken at a higher temperature can cause the meet to become a breeding ground for bacteria.
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