Surely you'd need to know how many people get Salmonella poisoning from non-washed eggs (either historically or elsewhere in the world) to draw this conclusion.

Here in the UK we don't wash our eggs as part of the production process. We have a "British Lion" safety mark on British-produced eggs as part of our food standards. Recently they were declared safe to eat raw even if you're pregnant as there were no cases of salmonella linked to them in 2016.

Germany had 12'000 cases of salmonella in 2016, 14'000 in 2017. USA has 300 Megacitizens, Germany 80. Germany vaccinates the chickens and does not wash or refrigerate eggs in the supermarket.

So, atleast in germany, you're 3 times less likely to get infected by salmonella, relative to the population.

I would however note that there is no reliable statistic on how many of those are due to eggs and how many are from other sources, considering meat and other products can carry it as well.

You can just look towards most of Europe for that data, only a few countries wash their eggs here.

Surely the rest of the world not washing their eggs means that you have those statistics freely available from any number of modern record-keeping nations, like France, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and so on and so forth?

What's even more amazing is that we address Salmonella by washing eggs rather than vaccinating hens. In many European countries, all laying hens are vaccinated, and you can make and eat raw eggs in all kinds of great things like chocolate mousse without worrying about Salmonella.

It's genuinely baffling.

EU has a higher salmonella rate than the USA.

Germany (not the EU) has a 3 times lower salmonella rate than the US (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19816018)

Do you have a source for this? It seems to be difficult to get exact numbers on this, but the BBC quotes data (for the UK and for “developed European countries”, whatever that means, so not exactly for the EU, and comparing to North America instead of just the US) that seem to suggest the opposite: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47440562

Uk, which does this properly, has a vastly lower rate.

In the U.K., from roughly 1995 to 2008, the number of vaccinated chickens went from 0% to 85%, and the rate of Salmonella went down by about 87.5%.

https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2013/01/poultry-vaccinations-...

The interviewee in the news report you've mentioned was probably cherry-picking. She said that "the number of laboratory-confirmed cases of illness dropped from more than 18,000 in 1993 to just 459 in 2010", but that 459 figure is most likely an outlier. According to Annual Epidemiological Report for 2016: Salmonellosis (https://ecdc.europa.eu/sites/portal/files/documents/AER_for_...), there were 8K to 10K confirmed Salmonella cases per year in the UK from 2012 to 2016.

On the other hand, according to Galiş et al. (2013), "Control of Salmonella Contamination of Shell Eggs—Preharvest and Postharvest Methods: A Review" (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1541-4337.1...), vaccination of chickens against Salmonella is _banned_ in Ireland. Yet, the country has the second lowest incidence rate of Salmonellosis (5.6-7.1 cases per 10K population over the five-year period 2012-2016, second only to Portugal) among all countries in the EU. In contrast, the incidence rates in the UK over the same period were significantly higher (12-15 cases per 10K).

Why are the Irish figures so low? Perhaps the Irish eat fewer eggs than the others. Perhaps most Salmonella infections are due not to eggs, but to other contaminated foods or poor kitchen hygiene. While vaccination of chickens against Salmonella is effective against egg-based Salmonella infection alone, without a detailed breakdown of numbers, we cannot tell what's its impact on the overall incidence rate.

You can look at the study she's referencing to the interviewer. It's pretty persuasive. Take a look at Figure 1. https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/56/5/705/347767

I'm not saying that the only way to control Salmonella is vaccination, but it is clearly an extremely effective method.

It's not the washing that does anything, it's the fridge - it keeps the salmonella from growing.

Other countries immunize their chickens. In the US only about half the chickens are immunized.

The washing does to something; eggs have a protective layer on the outside. Washing them removes it. With this layer, an egg cannot be invaded by bacteria after it's been laid.

Vaccinating the chickens and keeping the eggs unwashed is basically as much natural protection as you can get from nature, washing them means you have to protect the egg yourself a lot more, otherwise salmonella and other bacteria can infect it.

I'm sorry, but that is just not factually correct.

> With this layer, an egg cannot be invaded by bacteria after it's been laid.

They spray mineral oil, which works just as well. This layer the chicken leaves is just some oil, not magic. You do NOT need to refrigerate washed eggs in the US. You just don't.

Try it if you don't believe me. Take some eggs and leave them out for 2 months - they'll be just fine.

> washing them means you have to protect the egg yourself a lot more, otherwise salmonella and other bacteria can infect it.

See this is not factual either. Salmonella infects the eggs before they are laid, not after. That's why vaccinating the chickens works.

And as I said above, there is no additional protection needed with washed eggs.

Refrigerating eggs in the US is SOLELY to keep salmonella from multiplying inside the eggs. Despite what this article says it is NOT about washing the eggs which is simply done because they have unsightly feces on them, that's all.

This is genuinely incredible to me - with all the problems the US (among others) has with using broad-spectrum treatments to improve animal growth, we can't be bothered to vaccinate them?

Costs money!

Is the vaccine patented?

If not, someone ought to be able to make a big spinning needle-wheel to vaccinate chicks at a rate of 10 per second from a big bucket of vaccine.

If there's a patent, you can bet it'll be billed at a couple of dollars per dose, which is totally infeasable when 1 cent per chick can be the profit margin.

The vaccine costs $0.01 per chicken. And no, that's not a typo. Labor is a bit more, but not much - it's done in bulk by spraying it.

Buy some here: https://www.valleyvet.com/ct_detail.html?pgguid=FBE23AC3-EB6...

$41.40 for 5,000 doses.

Actually still sounds quite expensive... Like that's more than the cost of the drinking water or electricity for lighting for the whole life of the chicken...

But that's not how you do cost benefit analysis. If the cost to vaccinate a chicken is one or even several cents per chicken, then you're calculating the price offset based on the total yield of that chicken, i.e. the eggs that chicken produces.

Production chickens have a one day laying cycle, so you get about an egg a day, for about a year before production drops off to less than that. So that's 5 cents on a minimum of 350 eggs (more if the chicken is kept despite production drop-off), which would be a staggeringly irrelevant price increase per egg if vaccination would be legislated into being a mandatory practice.

Which it should be.

Years ago.