I’m based in the US, and I know sanitation practices for eggs are different throughout the world. I would like to center the question around that.
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I’ve also read infected chickens pass salmonella to their eggs, which doesn’t make sense to me as raw eggs are consumed very frequently in the US and is socially acceptable, while raw chicken is considered extremely unsafe.
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Well first off, raw eggs are absolutely a salmonella risk. It is significantly lower than raw chicken though. Still like 30 or so people a year die from it in the US, and over 100,000 people get sick from it a year.
~~However eggs are pasteurized (in the US) (except for smaller direct to consumer stuff like at farmers markets where they are generally labelled as uninspected) which kills off most of it.~~ In addition while salmonella can end up inside the egg most of the time it’s surface contamination on the shell.
With whole chicken the salmonella is easily passed around during processing unlike eggs which fo right into a carton from the wash. And chicken isn’t usually heat treated like eggs, so a rather large percentage of raw chicken you get at the store ends up contaminated. Something like 1 in 10 packages of chicken vs 1 in 20,000 eggs.
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