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In 2015 and 2016, E. coli-tainted flour sickened dozens of people in the United States, most of whom had eaten raw dough or batter while baking.
Eggs, long condemned for making raw cookie dough a forbidden pleasure, can stop taking all the blame. There's another reason to resist the sweet uncooked temptation: flour.
The seemingly innocuous pantry staple can harbor strains of
E. coli bacteria that make people sick. And, while not a particularly common source of foodborne illness,
flour has been implicated in two E. coli outbreaks in the United States and Canada in the last two years.
Pinning down tainted flour as the source of
the U.S. outbreak, which sickened 63 people between December 2015 and September 2016, was
trickier than the average food poisoning investigation, researchers recount November 22 in the
New England Journal of Medicine.
Usually, state health departments rely on standard questionnaires to find a common culprit for a cluster of reported illnesses, says Samuel Crowe, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, who led the study. But flour isn't usually tracked on these surveys. So when the initial investigation yielded inconclusive results, public health researchers turned to in-depth personal interviews with 10 people who had fallen ill.
Comment: What should we expect? America is the exceptional nation. Its athletes, by default, are equally exceptional. Shouldn't they be able to take whatever they want, whenever they want? Isn't that what the U.S. does?