NEWS : How Much Egg Risk?

The extent of Salmonella contamination in the nation’s egg supply remains unknown despite frequently quoted figures indicating it is minute.

The most common estimate is that one in 10,000 eggs carry the potentially harmful bacteria. Yet ongoing U.S. Department of Agriculture research indicates the level is probably several times higher.

The issue surfaced earlier this week when health officials from five Southern California counties issued a report indicating dramatic increases--as much as 1,700%--in the number of Salmonella illnesses linked to raw eggs since 1989. Between 1993 and 1994 alone, Los Angeles and Orange counties witnessed a 225% increase in the number of reported cases.

The five-county report warned that consumers, grocers and restaurateurs should take extra precautions when handling, storing and cooking raw eggs.

When USDA previously released consumer advisories stating that Salmonella enteritidis may be present in one out of every 10,000 eggs, it attributed the figure to a report written several years ago by John Mason, a retired veterinarian and former chief of USDA’s Salmonella Enteritidis Control Program.

But state and local health officials have criticized the figure.

S. Benson Werner, MD, chief of the disease investigations section for the state’s Health Services Department said the original research did not prove any such ratio between Salmonella and eggs.

“Even if that (rate) were true,” Werner said, “then it doesn’t mean it is true today, especially in the face of growing number of S. enteritidis cases.”

Other critics of the Mason data said that the government has never laboratory-analyzed 10,000 eggs to determine exactly how many are contaminated with Salmonella.

“The USDA is really a department of the agriculture industry and not as consumer-oriented as it might be,” said Shirley Fannin, MD, Los Angeles County director of disease control programs.

And Margaret Webb, a public affairs specialist with the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service said, “in 1990 everyone was using the one in 10,000 statistic but it was pulled out of the air.”

Mason, in a telephone interview, said that the one in 10,000 egg figure was used frequently in 1990 and acknowledged that it was a guess. But the ratio turned out to be fairly accurate, he said.

Since then, he said that a pilot testing program in Pennsylvania has that egg-laying flocks known to be infected with S. enteritidis are producing about three contaminated eggs per 10,000.

Even so, Webb maintains, “There is no scientific study that confirms that number.”

The reason the figure has come under attack is the way it has been used by the media to dismiss the risk of Salmonella from undercooked eggs. Recently, the Berkeley Wellness Newsletter ran an article, quoting Mason, stating that the incidence of egg-borne Salmonella was decreasing. (A brief summary of the Wellness Newsletter article also appeared in The Times Food section last week.)

In fact, both nationally and in California the number of S. enteritidis linked to eggs is rising. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports a 90% increase between 1985 and 1993, or the last year for which national data is available. During that same period, there were a total of 18,195 S. enteritidis cases, 1,978 hospitalizations and 62 deaths in the United States, CDC reports.

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“People have eaten eggs for a long time and just say, ‘Why should I worry now?’ ” said Hildy Meyers, MD, Orange County’s medical director of communicable disease control and epidemiology. “Well, things have changed and the eggs are apparently infected. Not all of them but we do not know the percentage and any estimates circulating are not based on scientific data at all.”

Neither is the egg industry downplaying the problem.

The Times has learned that a joint task force of government, academic and producer groups have held several meetings in recent months to formulate a plan to reduce S. enteritidis in the state’s egg-laying flocks.

“We are one of the first states to come forward and to put such a program together,” said Anne Downs, executive director of the Pacific Egg and Poultry Assn.

In addition to producers, Downs said that supermarkets, restaurants, schools, hospitals, consumers at home must also use proper handling and cooking to ensure safe eggs.

“Once the eggs leave us there is no insurance that they are refrigerated correctly,” she said. “The best advice is to cook eggs thoroughly because you don’t know how they have been handled.”