High Temperatures and Food Poisoning

by Lindsay Mitchell

            Imagine a life without cookie dough... it’s not a pretty sight. Many children treasure the memories of sneaking a few bites of their mother’s homemade cookie dough before the cookies were sent to the oven. In most recent years, they even sold pre-made dough that need only be cut into cookie shapes without all the hassle of making the dough from scratch. However, every little boy or girl who tried to dig their little fingers into that cookie dough probably heard something along these lines from a nearby adult: “Don’t eat that, there could be salmonella in that dough!” Although many children assumed it was simply a made-up threat on raw eggs, the facts are clear: salmonellosis is a strong and deadly form of food poisoning. What many children and most adults probably do not realize, however, is that severe food poisoning cases are actually strongly correlated with increases in temperature.

            According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are about 40,000 reports of salmonella in the United States per year and about 600 people die from the infection, with children and the elderly being the most vulnerable. The CDC reported more cases in the summer than in the winter because of higher temperatures increasing bacteria and encouraged thorough cooking of poultry, ground beef and eggs. Unfortunately it seems that cookie dough is out:  the CDC specifically states that individuals should not eat or drink foods containing raw eggs or raw unpasteurized milk (CDC, 2006).

            Not only does high temperature create a more inviting atmosphere for bacteria to survive and prosper, higher temperatures also increase the quantity of flies and pests with a correlation up to 0.84. By examining the relationship between the number of flies in six different locations compared to weather data over a series of four years, a group of scientists from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom determined that fly populations in the summer months would increase by 244% by the year 2080, therefore increasing the number of food related diseases, particularly fly-borne diseases (Goulson et al., 2005).

            However, salmonella and flies are not our only worries for food poisoning. Shellfish poisoning is on the rise and an increase in mercury in fish from warmer oceans is consequently negatively affecting humans who eat those fish. Rates of mercury into the environment would need to be decreased by 50% in order to ensure that humans were not exceeding their TWI, or tolerable weekly intake, by limiting the amount of fish, whales in particular, that were consumed (Booth and Zeller, 2005). Particularly in Alaskan coastal waters, high temperatures led to contaminated oysters which brought about a large food poisoning outbreak in 2004. Dr. Joseph Mclaughlin, a medical epidemiologist in Anchorage, explained that the ocean’s higher temperatures led to the virus “vibrio parahaemolyticus” which is closely related to cholera. Mclaughlin hinted that human contributions to global warming could be a possible threat to more outbreaks of contaminated seafood since the oceans appear to be getting warmer each year (Mclaughlin et al, 2005).

            With all the threats of food borne diseases, it makes you wonder why people are not doing more to protect our environment since it will in turn protect ourselves. By reducing our contributions to global warming, we could potentially reduce the temperatures of the environment including that of our surrounding oceans, which would lower mercury levels among fish, reduce the population of flies and pests, and perhaps even decrease the reports of salmonella poisoning throughout the United States. In the end if that means less cookie dough to snack on, so be it. I’d rather live to be 100 than die from that one last bite of raw egg anyday.

Works Cited

Booth, S. and D. Zeller, 2005: Mercury, food webs, and marine animals: implications of diet and                       climate change for human health. Environmental Health Perspective, 113, 521-526.

Department of Health and Human Services, 2006: Salmonellosis. Division of Bacterial and

Mycotic Diseases. Website viewed on November 29, 2007.

<<http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dbmd/diseaseinfo/salmonellosis_g.htm#How%20common%20is%20salmonellosis>>

Goulson, D., L. C. Derwent, M. Hanley, D. Dunn and S. Abolins, 2005: Predicting calyptrate fly                       populations from the weather, and the likely consequences of climate change. Journal of                 Applied Ecology, 42, 784-794.

Mclaughlin, J. B., A. DePaola, C. A. Bopp, K. A. Martinek, N. P. Napolilli, C. G. Allison, S. L.                       Murray, E. C. Thompson, M. M. Bird and J. P. Middaugh, 2005: Outbreak of Vibrio                     parahaemolyticus gastroenteritis associated with Alaskan oysters. New England Journal           of Medicine, 353, 1463-1470.