If you read the whole article, you'll see that in fact, the burgers were so contaminated with e-coli that they could have easily caused infection simply through contact with surfaces in the kitchen. In an experiment with a similar strain, scientists found that even after washing a cutting board with soap, it was still contaminated with e-coli, and when they wiped it with a towel, that got contaminated too.

To make matters worse, in a warm kitchen, e-coli will double once every 45 minutes.

In other words, once you've got one of these little biological weapons in your kitchen, if you're not wearing a hazmat suit and handling it like it's an ebola sample, you could get infected.