Ever-rising egg prices, supply shortages, egg thefts and reports of bodegas selling loose eggs confirm strong demand for the kitchen staple even as avian flu infects and kills more of the birds that produce them.
But as consumers eat their breakfasts, they may wonder whether the health risk is increasing as the virus spreads to species beyond birds, prompting scientists to sound the alarm that the H5N1 virus is mutating faster than anyone might know.
Food safety experts maintain the risk of contracting bird flu by touching or consuming eggs remains very low. And despite a strain of bird flu that has hit 747 dairy cattle herds in California alone, and an announcement nearly a year ago by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that one in five milk samples from grocery stores already tested positive for the virus, authorities say that non-raw milk products such as soft cheese and yogurt are safe for consumption as long as they have been pasteurized.
Given federal funding freezes, removal of scientific data and information from governmental websites, threats to future research, and an overall air of uncertainty surrounding public messaging by the new Trump administration, how can anyone be sure their risk is low?
Maurice Ernest Pitesky, associate professor at UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and an expert in disease modeling for avian flu, explains why it’s unlikely that you’ll get a bad egg. This interview has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.
Q: Do U.S. Department of Agriculture or state inspectors test for bird flu inside the egg?
A: No. When you get sick birds, that’s when the surveillance starts.
Q: So why shouldn’t we be worried about avian flu inside of eggs if not on the shell? For example, is it true that an infected bird doesn’t have time to lay another egg?
A: Yes. When laying hens get sick, they basically stop egg production. A couple scenarios could happen in theory. You could have an egg pop out right after the bird is infected. And maybe there’s feces on the egg and that feces has some of the virus on it. And maybe the virus gets inside the egg. But the virus is more in the respiratory and gastrointestinal tissue of birds. It’s not like milk, where the compartment where the animal produces the virus the most in is the milk-producing parts.
Q: What if we were to end up getting the leftover eggs from infected flocks that had to be culled?
A: If there was an infected house and there are a handful of those eggs and those eggs were exposed — Americans eat over a trillion eggs a year. That’s literally a drop in an ocean.
Q: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have slightly differing advice on the minimum temperature at which to cook eggs in order to stay completely safe from contamination. The FDA says 160 degrees Fahrenheit and the CDC says 165 degrees. Either way, this means cooking the egg all the way through, whether it’s a chicken, duck or quail egg, or a balut fetal egg (duck or quail) designated as an ethnic egg product rather than a shell egg. But many methods of common egg preparation fall below the recommended safety thresholds. Will indulging in sunny side-up eggs with pancakes, soft-boiled eggs in ramen, or raw eggs cracked into boiling soups at home or at a favorite restaurant lead to somewhat greater risk?
A: You’re talking about an outlier scenario. So, could I be talking about steak tartar with an egg yolk on top of it that happened to have the virus in it? And then maybe you rub your eyes or something because human cases have been more conjunctival, as is the case in dairy farms? I would see that as such a low-risk event. I’m pretty cautious as a scientist and also as a parent, and even now, I don’t see it as a major risk factor.
Q: For people who get their eggs from a noncommercial source, such as their own backyard flock: Is it a good idea to wash egg shells off at home?
A: No. I tell people not to wash their eggs, because most of the ways that people wash them have the potential to drive bacteria back into the egg. Don’t wash the eggs but make sure the eggs are being laid right in the nest box, collect them at least every 24 to 36 hours, and refrigerate them right away.
Q: So we really don’t have to worry at all about eggs and bird flu?
A: It’s biology, so it’s hard to say, “No, that’s never going to happen,” but I’d worry more about salmonella than I would about getting avian flu from table eggs.
Last year, a salmonella outbreak in eggs sickened 93 people across 12 states. Three of the egg consumers affected resided in California.
Pitesky is far more concerned about the impacts of backyard flocks and their owners’ behaviors on the outbreak. Hobbyists with chickens that happen to lay eggs are not subject to the same regulations as commercial egg producers.
Other things at the top of Pitesky’s mind are the occupational hazards faced by dairy workers and “cats infected with raw milk and raw turkey from infected carcasses.”
“I think the biggest issue is that the virus is now zoonotic — we’re having more and more humans that have been infected,” he said. “We’re really worried about it being human-to-human transmission eventually.”